Historic Recipe: Apple Cocada (1940)

Source: The Stork Wartime Cookery Book by Susan Croft (1940)

This book was a lovely present from my cast after we finished a production of Lilies on the Land in August, a show about Land Girls. It is full of useful wartime cooking advice including a section on ‘how to save your dinner if air-raids come’.

This recipe seems to be a slightly weird wartime/anglicised take on the classic Latin American coconut sweet.

Recipe:
6 cooking apples
4 ozs. desiccated coconut
½ pint milk
2-4 tablespoonsful soft brown sugar
1 oz. Stork Margarine

Soak the coconut in the milk for an hour. Brush a pie-dish with melted Stork, put in a layer of coconut. Peel, core and quarter the apples, put a layer of these into a dish. Sprinkle with sugar and dot with Stork. Repeat these layers once, adding enough sugar to sweeten the apples. If sour cooking apples are used, add plenty of sugar. Bake for an hour in a moderate oven.

The instructions were easy enough to follow, so I cracked on, cooking at 180c. After an hour, the ‘cocada’ came out slightly browned on top with the apples fully softened, but even so, it did not look massively appetising. The taste was actually quite nice, but the texture was wild, and not in a good way. The coconut/milk layer was incredibly crumbly, which is not an adjective I want to use to describe a milk mixture ever again. Additionally, the quartered apples were very chunky and didn’t form a full layer of their own. You basically got a milky/coconut-y mouthful, with occasional hints of apple puree.

Suggested alterations: Slice the apple and arrange them so that they make a complete layer between the coconut layers. This would also reduce the cooking time. I suspect the texture of the coconut could be improved by using a thicker milk product such a condensed milk.

Final verdict: I’m not sure I’d bother with alterations, just make one of the many delicious sounding cocada recipes available on the internet, this one can stay in the 1940s.