SOFT AND TENDER COCONUT MACAROONS
Preheat oven to 350˚F and line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment. In a mixing bowl, stir together one 14-ounce bag sweetened flaked coconut with one 5.4-ounce can coconut cream, 5 fluid ounces evaporated milk, ½ teaspoon vanilla extract, and a pinch of salt until thoroughly combined. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites of two large eggs. (It’s OK if the eggs mostly deflate during folding.) Using clean hands, form the coconut mixture into mounds the size of your choice (about 20 golf-ballsize mounds). Arrange on the prepared baking sheet. Bake, rotating the sheet front to back once halfway through, until macaroons are deep golden brown all over, about 35 minutes. Let cool on the baking sheet, then transfer to an airtight container and store at room temperature.
further in America than previously thought. For the longest time, anthropologists and historians believed that the only way early humans could have made it to the Americas was via ice bridges connecting Russia to Alaska,
but recent theories propose that intrepid migrants from Polynesia got here by sea—likely with a heavy reliance on me. And no wonder: I’m a long-lasting source of food and water, and my fibrous flesh is used to make rope, mats, mattress stuffing, and fishing nets. My shell can be turned into charcoal for fire or used as a bowl or musical instrument. My leaves are used for thatching roofs and making brooms and baskets, while my trunks are used for building houses, boats, and drums. My tree’s roots have an array of folk medicinal uses and produce pigments that become dyes— and their frayed ends have even been repurposed as toothbrushes. With all that, you can imagine how coconutrich cultures could thrive and spread across vast ocean distances.
Let me leave you with a sweeter presidential tale. A World War II naval patrol boat commanded by one John F. Kennedy was destroyed in 1943 by a Japanese warship. JFK and his surviving crew were stranded on an island and quickly running out of options. They were hungry, thirsty, and nursing injuries when they encountered two friendly native coast-watchers.
JFK scratched a message into a coconut shell: “NAURO ISL ... COMMANDER ... NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT ... HE CAN PILOT ... 11 ALIVE ... NEED SMALL BOAT ... KENNEDY.”
The coast-watchers delivered this to Allied forces, who managed to stage a rescue and get the crew back. Years later, Judge Ernest W. Gibson Jr., a colonel in the South Pacific during the war, gave the coconut shell to the newly elected president, who had it turned into a paperweight. It sat on his desk in the Oval Office throughout his presidency and now is a centerpiece of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston—as proof that we coconuts don’t take lives, we save them. RD