STAR INGREDIENT
This month Diana Henry brightens up the dark winter evenings with a taste of the tropics
Diana Henry’s coconut cream recipes
When I went, as a child, to old-fashioned tea rooms – all wood panelling and waitresses with white aprons – the coconut-speckled cakes were the ones I avoided. I especially disliked the little strawberry pink pyramids coated in it. The only coconut you could get in the UK at that time was desiccated. I hated the stuff. It seemed like a fake ingredient to me, unconnected to actual coconuts. The real thing didn’t look that inviting either; hairy with dark sunken little ‘eyes’ at one end. Of course, once cracked open, the flesh inside is the purest white, dense and crunchy. I eventually discovered this when we bought one, just out of curiosity, and smashed it on the front doorstep with a hammer. Shards went everywhere but we were amazed at the contrast between exterior and interior. The flesh was simultaneously buttery and fresh. The desiccated type was mouth-drying in contrast and if you were ever unfortunate enough to eat it stale (as it was in my grandmother’s baking cupboard), it tasted of soap. When Madhur Jaffrey appeared on our screens in the late 1970s we started to yearn for more than coconut macaroons. My mother’s first ‘curries’ – made with Ferns Curry Paste and a lot of sultanas – were served with sliced banana tossed in desiccated coconut. Where we got the idea that Madhur would approve of this, I don’t know, but it seemed deliciously exotic at the time.
At university, I started to cook Thai food (aided by Charmaine Solomon’s wonderful Complete Asian Cookbook) and was able to find blocks of creamed coconut – so different from the dried stuff on cakes. Thai curry was thick and sweet with it, evoking the heady scent of coconut sun lotion, vanilla and milk, buttery nuts and hot beaches. Now coconut is available in many forms. There’s coconut milk, coconut cream, creamed coconut, flour, sugar, oil, water, fresh chunks, and both sweetened and unsweetened shavings. It’s important to know the difference, particularly, between the milk, coconut cream and creamed coconut. Those firm blocks of creamed coconut aren’t the same as coconut cream. You can substitute one for the other, but creamed is made from coconut flesh that has been ground to a paste and compressed, giving it an intense flavour. It’s a good option if you only need to use a small bit and it seems like a waste to open a whole can of coconut milk or cream (plus, creamed coconut keeps for ages). The canned versions are produced by soaking freshly grated coconut in water to produce a liquid in which the cream rises to the top and the milk lies below. You still get a little of that liquid in cans of coconut cream, and there’s always a layer of the cream (on the top) in cans of coconut milk. Each has its uses in the kitchen, so a recipe might call for either one, but whatever dish I make with them still makes me think of beaches.