Cocada Yucateca (Palanqueta de Coco)

This is a Yucatecan candy. Specifically from the coast, where the coconut palms grow heavy along the road between Mérida and Progreso, and where the merengueros, the candy vendors, have walked the parks and plazas for generations with their wooden bandejas balanced on one shoulder.

The palanqueta de coco is not the cocada you may have eaten elsewhere in Mexico. It is not the oven-baked little mound with the toasted top from central Mexico. The Yucatecan version is darker, chewier, sweeter at the back of the throat from the azúcar mascabado and the piloncillo. The coconut is grated by hand, skin and all, so the candy comes flecked with brown. That is not a flaw. That is how you know nobody took a shortcut.

The technique is older than written recipes here. You cook the unrefined sugar with water and canela until it reaches soft-ball stage, you add the fresh coco and a squeeze of lime to keep the syrup from seizing, and you flatten the candy with a wooden pala onto papel encerado. The pala leaves its mark. That mark is the signature of a merenguero's hand and a Yucatecan kitchen.

My mother did not make cocada. She was from Jalisco and the candies of her childhood were jamoncillo de leche and ate de membrillo. I learned this one in Mérida from a woman named Doña Esperanza who sold palanquetas outside the church of Santa Ana every Sunday for forty years. She would not give me her exact proportions, no señora ever does, so I cooked alongside her three Sundays in a row and wrote down what I saw. This is that recipe. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.