Cocadas Oaxaqueñas

Cocadas are from Oaxaca, but more specifically they are from two places at once: the Pacific coast of the Costa Chica and Pinotepa Nacional, where the coconut palms grow heavy with fruit, and the dulcerías of the Centro Histórico in Oaxaca de Juárez, where the women who descend from the convent kitchens have been baking them onto banana leaves for generations.

This is a convent dessert as much as it is a coastal one. The slow reduction of milk and sugar, the tempering of egg yolks at the end, the shaping into uniform mounds, all of that comes from the Dominican and Carmelite nuns of colonial Oaxaca who turned the surplus sugar of the haciendas into dulces de leche, jamoncillo, dulce de yema, and cocadas. The coast brought the coconut. The convent brought the technique. Both belong to the cocada now, and you cannot make a real one without honoring both.

Do not use bagged shredded coconut. The senoras at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre will tell you the same thing. The dry, sweetened bagged stuff has lost its oil and its flavor, and it gives you a pale, sandy cocada that holds its shape but tastes like nothing. Crack a fresh mature coconut. It takes ten minutes. The cocadas it gives you are worth every one of them.

My mother did not make cocadas. She was from Jalisco and her dulces were jamoncillo and ate de membrillo. I learned cocadas from a Senora Constanza, an eighty-year-old vendor with a tray at Jardín Sócrates, who let me sit on a crate behind her stall for three afternoons in 1998 and watch her work. She tinted her tops with cochineal, not food coloring, and she baked them on banana leaves cut from her sister's tree in San Agustín Yatareni. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Oaxaca.