Zester Daily

My new favorite fish dish is modeled on a medieval chicken dish remotely descended from an ancient cheese spread. You heard me, cheese spread. You can think of the dish I am calling three-millennia fish as fish in a sort of thin Hollandaise made slightly florid with saffron and sweet spices.

The intermediate dish appears in a 14th-century Catalan manuscript called “Libre de Sent Soví,” where it is called pols soffrits ab alidem, “fried chickens with alidem.” The alidem part is what goes back to a cheese spread, because the Arabic word al-idam referred to a condiment you ate with bread.

Some other languages have the same sort of word. In ancient Greek, for instance, opson meant a bread relish, which in Athens was usually fish. And that’s where modern Greek gets its word for fish, psari (originally opsarion). In the medieval Middle East, the typical idams were semi-liquid cheese-like things such as kamakh rijal.

Catalonia was one of the first parts of Spain to free itself from the Moors, but they had left a strong imprint on its cooking, which otherwise would have turned out to be just a dialect of Provencal cuisine. For instance, escabeche, the preparation of cooked vegetables or fish dressed in vinegar that has spread throughout the Spanish-speaking world, comes from Arabic via the Catalan form escabeig, which is pronounced, believe it or not, as escabetch.

Somehow, al-idam took a strange turn in Catalonia. In the “Libre de Sent Sovi,” it meant a sort of sauce or dressing for cooked meat. Some of its alidems were made with toasted bread, so maybe there was a link with tradition there, but as they say in Catalan, Que sap?

The more usual alidem in Sent Soví was a mixture of beaten egg yolks, mixed spices (which the Catalans confusing call salsa), a sour ingredient (vinegar or sour grape juice), and water or stock. This would be cooked to a creamy consistency. Maybe the consistency was the link to the ancient cheese spread.

Medieval recipes are finicky in places but maddeningly vague in others. Pols soffrits ab alidem is one of the vague ones. It only says, “One takes the chickens and boils them; and then takes lard of salt pork and fries them. And then they go for slices and alidem for dishes.” (The cooking technique of boiling before frying reflected the toughness medieval chickens.)

When you check back to the book’s instructions on making alidem, the only flavorings you find mentioned are ginger, pepper, saffron “and other good spices,” so you’re on your own. Cinnamon and nutmeg were what occurred to me when I first tried this recipe. I must say, it came out delicate and luscious.

Perhaps because of the saffron I immediately thought it would also be a good preparation for fish. And behold, as they’d say in the Middle Ages, it was. Here is my fish adaptation of the medieval chicken in the former cheese sauce. I used cod in this recipe and I think it would work best with that or other mild fish, such as halibut or even catfish. It wouldn’t work as well with strong-flavored or fatty
fish, such as salmon or swordfish.

Three-Millennia Fish

Serves 4

Ingredients

12 to 15 threads saffron

¾ teaspoon ginger

½ teaspoon pepper

Pinch cinnamon

3 to 4 grindings fresh nutmeg

4 teaspoons vinegar or lemon juice

4 egg yolks

¾ to 1 cup white wine, fish sauce or clam juice

2 to 3 tablespoons light olive oil for frying

2 pounds fish filets

Directions

1. Grind the saffron to a powder in a mortar, or in a bowl with the back of a spoon. Add the ginger, pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg and mix them up with the vinegar. Beat in the egg yolks and then add the wine or water and beat smooth.

2. Pour the oil in a large frying pan and heat over high heat until the oil is fragrant, about 2 minutes. Pat the fish pieces dry and add them to the pan without crowding it; cook in more than one batch if needed.

3. Cook over high heat, stirring often, until the fish flakes easily when prodded with a fork, 2-4 minutes depending on thickness. Set the fish aside and discard the cooking oil.

4. Pour the egg and spice mixture in the pan over medium heat and cook until the sauce thickens, stirring constantly to keep it from sticking to the pan. Pour the sauce on the fish and serve.

Three-millennia fish. Credit: Charles Perry

There are, say, half a dozen main kinds of cake, but the range of frostings is theoretically unlimited. I’ve been experimenting with Asian flavor ideas. I’ve made pomegranate frosting and topped it with candied walnuts, swiping a flavor idea from the Iranian dish fesenjan, and I’ve used cardamom and saffron, a combination used in a number of Indian desserts.

And I love Thai food, so violà: ginger-lemongrass-coconut frosting. (Because the Thais use coconut as raw coconut milk, I ignore about my otherwise iron-clad rule of toasting coconut before using it in this recipe.) It’s an eye-opener, fresh and elegant.

The whole point of this frosting is to emphasize the flavors of the fresh ingredients. Ginger poses no particular problem because you can get ginger root in many supermarkets these days, and all you have to do is grate it. Then you strain out the juice and you’re in business.

Lemongrass is more of a chore, even when you can get it fresh. It’s nicely fragrant (in fact, one variety of lemongrass is used as a mosquito repellent under the name citronella) but the stalks are extremely fibrous, almost woody. It’s a fool’s errand to use a grater or even a mortar on it. For this, we have food processors. It goes without saying that when shopping for lemongrass, you should choose the freshest, least dry stalks, but you’ll have to make do with whatever the market carries.

Some shoppers may find another option, because recently some supermarkets have started carrying puréed ginger and puréed lemongrass in plastic squeeze tubes. One brand name to look for is Gourmet Garden. This is typically sold in a cold case alongside the packaged salads and refrigerated sauerkraut. To use these in this recipe all you have to do is press the purées in a fine sieve until you have enough juice.

If you don’t have access to lemongrass of any description, you can make an excellent frosting by substituting ¼ teaspoon lime zest and maybe some lime juice to taste.

There is obviously a world of exotic flavors out there. Still, though I try to keep an open mind, I don’t think I’ll try curry frosting anytime soon, basically because of the cumin, and scratch chili off my to-do list. I’ve experimented with making this frosting with fresh galangal (called kha in Thai) in place of the ginger, and I didn’t like it. Galangal is a cousin of ginger with a more pungent and distinctive flavor, but it proved way too pungent, almost mustardy. With that in mind, I’m tentatively scratching honey-mustard off my to-do list as well.

But ranch dressing flavor? I don’t know, maybe. I’ll get back to you on that.

 Thai Coconut Cake

Serves 8 to 12

For the cake:

½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter plus about ¼ cup, softened

3 cups all-purpose flour, plus 2 tablespoons for dusting

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

Directions

1. Generously rub the insides of 2 (9-inch) cake pans with the ¼ cup of softened butter, then dust with 2 tablespoons of flour and shake out the excess.

2. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the vanilla to the milk.

3. Beat the butter until light, about 3 minutes, then gradually beat in the sugar until the mixture is smooth and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating 20 seconds after every addition.

4. Add 1 cup of the dry mixture and beat at medium speed just until the flour is incorporated, coaxing the flour into the mixture with a flexible scraper. Add ½ of the milk and do the same. Repeat with the remaining flour and milk. Stir up from the bottom with a scraper to make sure the mixture is uniform and beat at medium speed for a couple of seconds.

5. Divide the batter between the two prepared cake pans. The total weight of the batter is 50 ounces, so each layer should weigh 1 pound 9 ounces (if you include the weight of the cake pans, that will be 2 pounds 5 ounces). Bake at 350 F until the tops are golden brown all over and spring back if lightly touched, and the layers are starting to pull away from the sides.

6. Remove the pans from the oven and set them on racks to cool for 10 minutes. Overturn the pans and remove from the layers, then set the layers right side up again and leave until cool, about ½ hour, before frosting.

For the frosting:

1½- to 2-inch length of fresh ginger

5-6 stalks of lemongrass

1 tablespoon vodka

1 cup sugar

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

¼ cup water

¼ cup light corn syrup

2 egg whites

2½ to 3 cups shredded or flaked coconut

Optional: 1-2 drops green food coloring, 3-4 drops yellow food coloring

1. If you can find ready-puréed ginger and lemon grass, press them through fine sieves to get ¼ to ½ teaspoon juice each. If you can’t find the ready-puréed kind, follow this procedure using the first three ingredients: Grate the ginger and strain enough to get ¼ to ½ teaspoon juice. Chop the lower, whitish part the lemongrass stalks into ¾-inch lengths and process them in the food processor (checking the blades from time to time to make sure that they haven’t gotten fouled and are still running free) until it looks like lawnmower clippings with no solid chunks, about 3-4 minutes. Add the vodka and process a few seconds longer, then sieve out as much liquid as you can. Set the juices aside.

2. Place the sugar, salt, cream of tartar, water, corn syrup and egg whites in the top of a double boiler and beat until foamy.

3. Pour 3 or 4 cups of water in the bottom of the double boiler and bring it to a boil over high heat. When it is at full boil, set the top of the double boiler over it and beat continuously with a hand-held mixer at top speed (about 12 minutes) until the beaters form deep sculptural folds in the frosting, the sheen has begun to fade, and the frosting forms firm peaks when the beaters are removed.

4. Remove the top of the double boiler and beat the frosting at high speed off heat for 1 minute. Beat in the ginger and lemongrass juices to taste. If you want to alert diners that this is not ordinary coconut cake, add food colorings to taste.

Assembly

1. Set one cooled cake layer upside down on a serving plate. Using no more than ¼ of the frosting, frost the top of the layer and sprinkle with 1 cup of the coconut.

2. Set the other layer over this, right side up (flat side down), and cover the cake with the rest of the frosting. Sprinkle the rest of the coconut over the top of the cake and pat it onto the sides.

Thai coconut cake with lemongrass and ginger. Credit: Charles Perry

Does anybody still make trout amandine? Once upon a time — back in the sole Veronique era of America’s discovery of French cuisine — restaurants often scattered trout with toasted almond slices, and voilà, truite amandine (or “almondine,” if it was a continental restaurant), I still see green beans amandine once a year at my family’s Thanksgiving, but between times, not so much.

Still, toasted nuts have a marvelously appetizing aroma that goes very well with meat, and we ought to take advantage of it. They know this in the Middle East. The usual Lebanese stuffing for vegetables or meat pastries is onions, ground lamb and pine nuts, all fried quite brown. They usually stuff turkey with the same mixture.

I don’t think toasted almonds show their best with beef (though toasted walnuts might), but they definitely add something to lamb, chicken, fish and veal. There’s an excellent Spanish dish called ternera a la condesita, which is veal scallops sautéed with toasted almonds, blackened garlic cloves and dry sherry.

Infusing Lebanese traditions with French amandine

Some years ago I cooked a lot of Lebanese dishes for a woman who was a knowledgeable French cook. I often made her one of my favorites, djaj mahshi, which literally means “stuffed chicken,” though no stuffing is involved. Basically, you simmer a hen of respectable age with a cinnamon stick until tender, then use some of the cooking liquid to make pilaf. To serve, you fill bowls with rice, overturn them on the serving plates and top the rice mounds with shredded chicken, a handful of almonds and pine nuts fried in clarified butter and a gravy made with the remainder of the cooking liquid.

She seemed to enjoy what I made for her well enough, but I wasn’t sure my cooking really registered with her until one day I found her making a light, elegant chicken sauté. It was your basic French dish of chicken fried brown and cooked in white wine with which she had deglazed the pan. One difference was that she threw in a lot of garlic and lemon juice, which is very Lebanese. And at the end, she reduced the pan juices to a glaze, tenderly spooned it onto the chicken pieces and sprinkled the whole thing with almonds browned in butter.

Characteristically, she served it with cherry tomatoes and crusty French bread. So it was Franco-Lebanese fusion, in effect.

A new fusion

Recently I started thinking of combining toasted almonds with fish, but not at all in the old trout “almondine” way with white sauce. What I came up with was a more Mediterranean sort of dish that might be considered Provencal-Lebanese fusion, in effect.

Salmon Amandine with Saffron Aioli

Serves 2

Ingredients

⅔ cup slivered or sliced almonds

Salt

2 (½-pound) salmon filets

2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar

10-12 threads saffron

1 clove garlic, or less, to taste

4 tablespoons mayonnaise

Directions

1. Either toast the almonds in a baking sheet at 350 F until golden brown and fragrant, 8 to 10 minutes, or fry them in oil over medium heat, stirring constantly, and when browned pat dry with paper towels. Sprinkle the almonds with salt to taste.

2. Place enough water in a large pan to cover the filets and acidulate it with lemon juice or vinegar. Bring the water to a bare boil and cook the filets until done, turning over carefully once or twice. To test for doneness, tease the filets with a fork to see whether the meat flakes all the way through.

3. Put the saffron in a mortar and grind it to a powder. (If you use powdered saffron, remember to buy it fresh, add as much as you like to the finished sauce). Put the garlic through a garlic press into the mortar and add the mayonnaise. Stir until it has an even color.

4. To serve, scatter the filets with the nuts and spoon the saffron aioli on the side.

Salmon Amandine With Saffron Aioli. Credit: Charles Perry

Super Bowl is not a meal, it’s more like agony and ecstasy with side orders of barbecue and nachos. That’s why people never think of a Super Bowl dessert as something to accompany the big game menu, unless it’s ready-made, like ice cream or maybe cheesecake.

But I’ve got a home-baked cake that no sports fan is going to turn down, I guarantee it. This is a cake with maple frosting, sprinkled with bacon. Yeah, that’s right, a cake with a pound of bacon in it.

This is an obvious sort of flavor combination to Americans. Once upon a time, I suppose, bacon and pancakes were meant to occupy neutral corners of our breakfast plates, but in accordance with the laws of physics and children’s love of playing with their food, the bacon inevitably came into contact with maple syrup, and it proved to be true love. You can even find maple-cured bacon these days.

You don’t have to search a long way to get the same flavor combination in a cake. All you need is any old maple syrup, though the flavor will obviously be better if you use 100% maple, rather than the maple-flavored kind. If you can find it, Grade B syrup, which is less light and elegant than Grade A, is even better for cooking than Grade A, in my opinion. It’s also cheaper.

Splurge for Super Bowl dessert

The butter cake in this recipe is the best choice because it underlines the assistant flavors of the pancake-bacon-maple breakfast team with butter and eggs. This recipe uses a whole lot of sugar and fat, but don’t worry. Super Bowl Sunday is not the day to worry about sugar and fat. This can be a special occasion treat, but probably isn’t a good regular dessert. The cake recipe below is for a basic butter cake. Experienced cake bakers will know that the cake layers are much easier to remove from the cake pans if you line the pan bottoms with parchment paper after buttering them and then butter and flour the parchment paper.

You can omit the cream of tartar in the frosting, but it won’t beat as high. Imitation maple flavoring is made from a spice called fenugreek, so if you do use it, be careful not to add more than 3 drops or the fenugreek flavor may become distracting, even unpleasant.

Butter Cake

Serves 8 to 12

Ingredients

½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter plus about ¼ cup, softened

3 cups all-purpose flour, plus 2 tablespoons for dusting

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

Directions

1. Generously rub the insides of 2 (9-inch) cake pans with softened butter, then dust with 2 tablespoons of flour and shake out the excess.

2. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the vanilla to the milk. Beat the butter until light, then gradually beat in the sugar until the mixture is smooth and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating 20 seconds after every addition.

3. Add 1 cup of the dry mixture and beat at medium speed just until the flour is incorporated, coaxing the flour into the mixture with a flexible scraper. Add ½ of the milk and do the same. Repeat with the remaining flour and milk. Stir up from the bottom with a scraper to make sure the mixture is uniform.

4. Divide the batter between the two prepared cake pans. The total weight of the batter is 50 ounces, so each layer should weigh 1 pound 9 ounces (if you include the weight of the cake pans, that will be 2 pounds 5 ounces).

5. Bake at 350 F until the cake tops are golden brown all over and spring back if lightly touched, and the layers are starting to pull away from the sides.

6. Remove the pans from the oven (do not turn the oven off; see next step) and set them on racks or folded towels to cool for 10 minutes. Overturn the pans and remove the cake layers, then set the layers right side up again and leave until cool, about ½ hour.

Bacon Topping

Ingredients

1 pound sliced bacon

Directions

1. After you take the cake pans out of the oven, separate the bacon into strips and arrange these on a baking sheet. Bake at 350 F until the strips are brown and stiff and the fatty parts are crumbly, about 45 minutes. For even cooking, turn the slices over with tongs or a spatula 2 or 3 times while baking.

2. Remove the slices to sheets of paper towel to drain.

3. When the bacon strips are cold, break them up (in sheets of paper towel to absorb excess fat).  Mince any hard pieces quite small.

Maple Frosting

Ingredients

1 cup sugar

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

¼ cup water

¼ cup maple syrup

2 egg whites

¼ teaspoon vanilla

Optional: 2-3 drops maple flavoring

Directions

1. Put the sugar, salt, cream of tartar, water, maple syrup and egg whites in the top of a double boiler. Beat until foamy.

2. Put 3 or 4 cups of water in the bottom of the double boiler and bring it to the boil over high heat. When it is at a full boil, set the top of the double boiler over it and beat continuously with a hand-held mixer at top speed until the beaters form deep sculptural folds in the frosting, it has begun to lose its sheen and when you remove the beaters, the frosting forms firm peaks, about 7 minutes.

3. Remove the top of the double boiler and beat the frosting at high speed off heat for 1 minute. Beat in the vanilla and optional maple flavoring.

Assembly

Set one layer upside down on a serving plate. Using no more than ¼ of the frosting, frost the top of the layer and sprinkle with ½ of the bacon bits. Set the layer over this, right side up (flat side down), and cover the cake with the rest of the frosting. Sprinkle the rest of the bacon as evenly as you can over the top.

Top photo: Super Bowl dessert: Butter cake with maple frosting and bacon topping. Credit: Charles Perry

One thing foodies never do is buy any of those pre-roasted chickens from the hot display at the supermarket.  Never, never, never! (Well, just that once, I swear it!)

They’re definitely pre-fab food, but you can easily doctor them. In fact, medieval recipes often called for chicken to be roasted or baked and then stewed in a sauce. The first stage browned the meat desirably while the stewing stage was a necessity, because before the 20th century most chickens were tough old hens past their egg-laying days who needed a good course of moist heat to become tender.

It’s actually hard to find an elderly stewing hen these days, so we have to make do anyway. I say why not accept a compromise with the times and let the supermarket do part of the work? The pre-roasted chickens are generally what used to be considered frying size (often far smaller than any chickens you can find in the butcher section) so they’re naturally tender and don’t really need any stewing at all. You only need to make the sauce part of the recipe and warm the chicken up in it.

A royal recipe with pre-roasted chickens

So here’s a quick, 21st-century way of making Chekyns in Musc, from “Ancient Cookery,” a collection of 14th- and 15th- century royal recipes written down during the reigns of various English monarchs beginning with Edward III.

Inevitably, earlier stages of a language look quaint and rustic. This recipe begins, “Take smale chekyns and make hom clene, and choppe hom, and do hom in a pot, and put therto gode brothe of fressh flesh and wyn, and let hom seethe.” Among the flavorings you should “do therto” were “raisynges of corance” and “zolkes (sic) of raw eggus,” and finally you were supposed to boil everything “togedur” and “serve hit forthe.”

It may look bizarre on the page, but this was a royal recipe, and it aimed at the sophisticated effect of its time: rich and sweet-sour, with an intoxicating jumble of aromas. I presume “musc” was musk, and perhaps there is something musky about the combination of sage, clove, mace, saffron and raisins.

The recipe actually calls for currants. These are the “raisynges of corance,”  that is, raisins of Corinth,  called for in the recipe. But currants are hard to find outside the holiday season, when they get enough play for the rest of the year in mincemeat and fruitcake. If you can find them, currants are actually nicer than raisins for this dish, but the difference is not huge. Personally, I would toast the pine nuts because I happen to find raw pine nuts insipid, while toasted pine nuts are everything popcorn promised but didn’t deliver.

The recipe calls for verjuice (verjus), which is sour grape juice. You can sometimes find it in import stores, particularly Middle Eastern ones. In Arabic it’s called ‘asir hisrim and in Farsi it’s ab ghureh. You can substitute lemon juice. In fact, the Italians have done so quite systematically, as their medieval word for verjuice, agresto, is now just a term for lemon juice.

Anyway, this is a fine cool-weather dish for two people, or one medieval-style glutton.

Chekyns in Musc

Serves 2 to 3

Ingredients

1 (1½- to 2-pound) chicken, roasted or baked

½ cup strong chicken stock or 1 teaspoon chicken concentrate mixed with ½ cup water

1 cup white wine

6-8 leaves fresh sage

2 tablespoons minced parsley

1 clove, freshly ground

¼ teaspoon mace, freshly ground

¼ cup pine nuts

½ cup currants or raisins

10 threads saffron, ground

2 egg yolks

Salt and pepper to taste

1 tablespoon verjuice or lemon juice

Directions

1. If the chicken is not already separated, divide it into drumsticks, thighs, wings and breast. Dismantle the breast into 6 to 8 pieces. Remove the skin and the bones if you like.

2. Put the stock and wine in a saucepan and boil until the smell of alcohol goes away. Reduce the heat to a simmer, add the sage, parsley clove, mace, pine nuts, currants and saffron and cook until the currants are plumped, 5 minutes. Add the chicken parts and heat through.

3. Remove the chicken parts. Beat the egg yolks with 1 or 2 tablespoons of hot cooking liquid, then stir the eggs into sauce to thicken it. There will not be much sauce. Taste and add salt and pepper if needed. Stir in the verjuice or lemon juice, add the chicken parts and warm up again before serving.

Pre-roasted chicken. Credit: iStockphoto

Snow is pretty much a theoretical thing to Californians, but we are aware out here that it is associated with Christmas somehow. We dutifully put white stuff on and around our Christmas trees to represent snow.

It’s the meteorological symbol of the season, and this is how I got thinking about the only snowball I knew when I was growing up, a mysterious dessert that was called a snowball. It was coated with shredded coconut — as a result, for years I had a thoroughly false impression of what a real snowball is like — but I can’t remember what the rest of it was.

Was it a cake? A miniature cake in spherical form? You couldn’t make that at home because spherical cake molds are pretty hard to find. And anyway, it didn’t seem quite worth the trouble because you can have coconut cupcakes any time of year. And I didn’t want to make my snowball with ice cream, too messy. Too cold, in fact.

Extra sweet for a special treat

But ever since I discovered how easy it is to make marshmallow, I’ve been trying to think of new ways to use it. So how about marshmallow made in cupcake molds and then covered with a gentle snowfall of shredded coconut?

The idea dazzled me. It reawakened a childhood dream, the possibility of a cake that was all frosting. Marshmallow is a first cousin to frosting. It’s a sort of meringue made with gelatin instead of egg white. The classic American seven-minute icing is actually a meringue; a classically trained chef could call it a sort of Swiss meringue. The difference is that marshmallow is more luscious than meringue because it’s solidified by playful, jiggly gelatin instead of stiff cooked egg white.

These don’t come out quite spherical, but neither does every real snowball, so I am informed. It’s basically just a ball of luscious sweetness. In fact, it’s very, very sweet, as a glance at the ingredient list will reveal. Unless you’re a child with a raging sweet tooth, you’d probably want to have something non-sweet with it, say, coffee with no sugar at all.

And anyway, the holiday season comes but once a year. You can atone by eating rice crackers after New Year’s.

Marshmallow and Coconut Snowballs

Makes 8 snowballs

Ingredients

1 cup water, divided

2 tablespoons unflavored gelatin

1½ cups sugar

½ cup light corn syrup

¼ teaspoon vanilla

About 1 cup confectioner’s sugar

About 2 cups shredded or flaked coconut

Directions

1. Put ½ cup water in a mixing bowl (preferably mixing bowl of an electric mixer) and sprinkle the gelatin on the surface. Set aside until the water is absorbed, about 5 minutes.

2. Make a double boiler by setting a small saucepan on a burner with a cup or two of water in it. Bring to a medium boil and set the mixing bowl over it until the gelatin dissolves, about 6 minutes (it will be transparent with a faint brown color with perhaps a little foam floating on top). Set aside to cool. If you didn’t melt the gelatin in the bowl of your stand mixer, transfer it there.

3. Put the other ½ cup water in a small saucepan, preferably nonstick, along with the sugar and the corn syrup. Bring to the boil, put a lid on the pan and boil 3 minutes for the steam to wash any sugar crystals off the walls of the pan. Remove the lid, insert a thermometer into the pan and boil until the syrup reaches any temperature from 238 to 244 F.

4. Pour the syrup onto the gelatin and beat the mixture on high speed until it is relatively cool, about 25 minutes.

5. Spray a cupcake mold or molds (this recipe makes about 8 snowballs) with nonstick spray.

6. Beat the vanilla into the marshmallow and transfer it to the cupcake mold by ladles, scraping the ladles off with a spoon or scraper. Fill to the top of the molds. Cover with plastic film and refrigerate at least 12 hours.

7. Spread the confectioner’s sugar on a work surface. Run a butter knife around the edges of the molds and carefully pry the snowballs out. Put them broad side down on the confectioner’s sugar to keep them from being sticky.

8. Pour the coconut onto a plate and separate the shreds of they are clumped together. One at a time, pick up the snowballs and roll the sides and the top in the coconut. Transfer to a serving plate and patch any bald spots with coconut.

Photo: Marshmallow and coconut snowballs. Credit: Charles Perry