The Caribbean · Volume 12, The Sofrito, the Libreta and the Ninety Miles to Miami
Cucurucho de coco
Baracoa, Guantánamo
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 106 sources in the brief
A cucurucho is a cone of yagua, the leaf sheath of the royal palm, sewn with a strip of the same leaf, lidded and tied, and packed with a thick sweet of grated coconut cooked with fruit and sugar or honey. The fruit is guava, papaya, pineapple and orange; the Guantánamo paper Venceremos, quoting the 2013 book Baracoa: Más allá de La Farola, uses their peels and adds anise, cinnamon and clove, and says the best is made with bees' honey. The Slow Food Ark of Taste, on the nomination of Nilda Durand Leyva, says the cone keeps it up to a year.
The quantities are Silvia Mayra Gómez Fariñas's, from Cubadebate in 2018, a home batch for four. Island clock. She says the cucurucho is hard to find outside Baracoa. CubaConecta, published off the island, gives a seller's batch of 20 dry coconuts, 16 pounds of brown sugar and the peel of 10 Seville oranges, cooked together about half an hour, and the cone sewn and its base lined with banana leaf passed over the flame. The cone is the cucurucho's half, and in Britain there is no yagua.
As tradition built it
Serves 4.
Ingredients
- 2 cups grated coconut
- to cover water
- 1 cup cooked fruit: guava, papaya, pineapple and orange, the orange de-bittered
- 1½ cups sugar or honey
- 2 strips lime peel
- a pinch salt
- as needed yagua cones, or banana leaf
Method
- Put the grated coconut in a caldero with water to cover and cook it until soft.
- Add the cooked fruit, the sugar or honey, the lime peel and the salt, and cover again with water.
- Cook it until the syrup thickens and, when you stir, you can see the bottom of the pan.
- Let it cool and pack it into the yagua cones.
Notes
Venceremos gives no quantities: grate the coconut and cook it a long time until fully soft, add the fruit peels and cook a few minutes more, then the sugar or honey and the sweet spices, stirring often until the mass sets.
What a modern chef changes
The coconut fresh, the orange peel candied, and a cone that will hold
Method
- Grate a fresh coconut and cook it in its own water, topped up, in place of plain water. The sweet starts with more coconut.
- Blanch the orange peel in two changes of fresh water before it goes in. That is what de-bittering means, and it leaves a clean bitter edge against the sugar.
- Take it to the cue, then a little past: the pan bottom showing as you stir, and the mass holding a ridge. A firmer sweet is what keeps in a cone.
- Make the cone from banana leaf passed over a flame, as CubaConecta's Baracoa sellers do for the lid, folded double and tied with string. It is not yagua, and the label should say so.