School days – attraction of sweets made of coconuts

Coconuts have always had a special place in the lives of Bengalis – and, sweets prepared from coconuts had an added attraction of their own.

I remember in the days previous to Durga Puja festivals. My father would bring home at least four coconuts – the ones with the hard outer skins removed. The procedure involved first breaking the hard outer shell to expose the milk white kernel inside. Then mother would sit on the ground with the specially designed equipment to gradually scoop out the kernel on to a flat plate. It was a painstaking process and ashes copped out the insides, it began to accumulate on the plate in the form of a mound.
Once it was done, the grated coconuts would go into a large vessel and put over the heat. She would add sugar and, as the sugar meted, it mixed with the grated coconut to create a new mass that was waiting to be eaten. For flavor, she would add powdered cardamom.

Then would come another tedious process – converting this mass into round shapes because those would then become easy to handle and, also, easy to gobble up.
At times she would put the whole mass on a flat plate and cut them into rectangles, or triangles or rhombus to bring variety into the final product. (to be continued …)