cocadas

Portuguese sailors named the coconut 'coco' around 1500, seeing three dark holes in the base of the shell that resembled a grinning face. The word spread with the Portuguese trading empire from West Africa to Brazil to the Philippines. By the mid-16th century, 'coco' was the standard Spanish and Portuguese name for the fruit, and the suffix '-ada' was ready to turn it into a prepared food: naranjada from naranja, limonada from limón, cocada from coco.

The earliest cocadas appeared in the sugar-producing regions of colonial Brazil and the Caribbean during the 17th century. African enslaved workers in plantation kitchens combined grated coconut with the refined sugar they were forced to produce, cooking the mixture over fire until it set into a sweet, firm mass. The technique required nothing but heat, coconut, and the sugar that surrounded them. The candy was cheap to make, dense with calories, and it traveled.

Each country shaped the cocada to local taste. Mexican cocadas, sold from market stalls since at least the early 1800s, are white mounds of shredded coconut and sugar syrup, sometimes tinted pink or green with food coloring. Brazil's cocada preta is darkened with rapadura, an unrefined cane sugar, until it turns nearly black. Colombia and Venezuela prefer a pale, soft version; the Philippines developed something called 'bukayo' using young coconut flesh. All trace back to the same operation: coconut, sugar, heat, and cooling.

In the 20th century, cocadas spread through Latin immigrant communities in the United States and crossed back into Spain, where they appear today in specialty food shops. The word entered English food writing in the 1990s, still wearing its Spanish plural, naming a category of coconut candy now made on five continents. The sailor's joke about a monkey face became a global market.