poonac

Poonac is the dry, fibrous cake that remains after coconut meat has been pressed for its oil. The Tamil word puṇṇākku names any oil-seed residue, and coconut poonac became foundational to the agricultural economy of Sri Lanka and the Malabar coast. For every liter of coconut oil extracted in the coir-and-copra belt, a corresponding weight of poonac went to feed the cattle: a closed cycle that sustained itself for centuries.

The coconut palm had been cultivated along the Coromandel and Malabar coasts for at least two thousand years before European traders arrived. Oil pressing was a village industry, with heavy stone or wooden presses driven by bullocks walking slow circles in the pressing yard. The poonac from each session was the by-product that kept those same bullocks working the following day. This loop was so efficient and so ordinary that it rarely needed naming in the records that survive.

British colonial administrators in Ceylon began cataloguing poonac in agricultural surveys from the 1830s onward. The Colombo commodity markets listed it alongside copra and coir rope by the 1860s. As Crown plantation agriculture expanded across the island and pressed coconut oil for export to European soap manufacturers, poonac became a commodity in its own right, shipped north and east as cattle feed and a base for fertilizer.

Henry Yule and Arthur Burnell recorded poonac in Hobson-Jobson, their 1886 glossary of Anglo-Indian terms, noting it as current across Ceylon and the Malabar coast. That entry gave the word a fixed English spelling and a place in the colonial lexicon. Today poonac remains in ordinary use in Sri Lankan English as the standard word for pressed coconut cake, though it has largely disappeared from British dictionaries since the plantation trade that carried it abroad contracted after independence.