Coquito and Canned Goods

Holiday beverage, strange history

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Coquito and Canned Goods

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Coquito! It means little coconut, it’s got rum, and it’s from Puerto Rico. Other islands around the Caribbean have similar drinks, but here are the coquito-specific ingredients: rum, coconut milk, cream of coconut, sweetened condensed milk, vanilla, nutmeg, clove, and cinnamon. You’ll notice that it does not contain eggs. 

Condensed milk is partially dehydrated milk; the sweetened part is that sugar is added to it during the dehydrating. The first person we know of who successfully made condensed milk was Nicolas Appert, in 1820. (Nicolas is the father of canned foods overall.) An American named Gail Borden picked up the work again in the 1850s. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people who wanted milk just walked over to the nearest cow. But now, people lived in cities and milk was making people sick and killing kids. Well, not so much the milk itself, necessarily, but the conditions the cows were kept in. Borden created the Eagle Brand company, which still exists, and he created best practices for fresh milk, too: his dairy suppliers were required to both boil-to-scalding and completely dry their hardware twice a day, and they had to wash the cow’s udders before they milked them. 

Condensed milk caught on pretty quickly after that - it was probably the first canned product that US consumers were buying regularly. And then the Civil War started and the government ordered up a ton of condensed milk for the Union side. 

Now, this is a trend: canned goods were literally invented for war (Nicolas Appert, who I mentioned earlier, created his canning processes at the behest of Napoleon, who was like, we gotta get some fish into these boys if we’re gonna fight the Russians. Which … a good idea, certainly.) Canned food has played a pivotal role in every war from that time through the Vietnam War. A company called National Food Product used this slogan in the 1940s: Wars Are Fought With Food. Just layin’ it out there! No need to be coy, I guess!

During WWI the US government paid over market price for milk for condensed milk, which actually messed up the domestic dairy industry in some pretty notable ways, but that’s an episode for another day.

To back up, timeline-wise, creamy, eggy alcoholic drinks came to the Caribbean with the European invaders - here I’ll plug the egg nog episode again, if you want more background. But these were always more popular on the Atlantic seaboard, where it’s colder and the colonizer’s food culture relied more on dairy products. Puerto Rico was not heavily be-cowed, and it wasn’t until the Spanish-American War, when Puerto Rico became a US territory, did the main ingredient become available: sweetened condensed milk. Plus coconut milk, as well as cream of coconut, which is not an easy product to make fresh - so when Puerto Rican Ramón López Irizarry created Coco Lopez in 1948, in Puerto Rico, using a government grant to perfect the process, coquito was poised to really go gangbusters.

I think what we’re seeing here is that coquito is a product created of canned goods. There was no prior, more “authentic” version. The authenticity is actually in the cans, just as Spam-based dishes around the Pacific Rim are original creations. 

There are hot drinks indigenous to the Caribbean and Central America, but those are corn and/or chocolate based - in other words, indigenous ingredients. But thousands of years later, locals were still working with what they had to create new recipes. What they had, had changed quite a bit. 

When Europeans took over Puerto Rico, they forced people to work the land to grow crops meant for export. And it was monoculture farming, which always ruins soil to some extent. 

So heading into WWI, there simply wasn’t enough food in Puerto Rico - the island now didn’t grow a wide variety, and anyway it was all earmarked for export. 

I read a quote by Philip Dodd of Britain’s National Army Museum, where he said that canned food was a pillar of maintaining empire - it brought western food to colonies around the world. 

There’s a book that’s quoted a ton in essays and papers about canned goods and colonialism. It was written in the early 1900s by an American woman living in the Philippines. Her name was Edith Moses, and she was a monster. “Unofficial Letters of an Official’s Life” is full of stories wherein she mocks Filipino cooking and talks about how dirty it is - she believed local ingredients caused cholera. Her response was unfortunately common: she stuck to canned good from the US and Europe. She even made fun of local twists on canned goods, like adding sugar to canned corn. Canned goods were a weapon of control. Either you ate them as a westerner would, or you were subhuman. Plus, up until the 1930s, canned goods could be pretty expensive, so they were often aspirational to locals, too. The whole thing is a mess, but it did create some amazing food. 

In the two world wars, governments were buying up all the canned food available to feed soldiers. Which means that when WWII ended, all these farmers and canners and factory owners were like, “hey, we had a good thing going, let’s not lose it.” I’m simplifying but that is when and why the world was first inundated with processed food. People who get rich during wartime just change their marketing, and keep getting richer. 

Post-WWII, a lot of Puerto Rico residents received government help to buy food. A lot of them also didn’t have refrigerators. And the US was sending canned goods to the island. And Puerto Rico was exporting its crops, which by this time were mostly coffee and sugar and tobacco anyway - not exactly sustenance. So you see why canned goods became a staple. It is now thought that 80% food eaten in Puerto Rico is from the US, or at least routed through the States. And as processed food becomes ever more processed, we still send the least nutritious stuff - remember the footage of the “care packages” Puerto Rico received from the US in 2018 after Hurricane Maria? It was, like, Gushers and Cheez-Its. 

This all is why it’s especially important not to call coquito “Puerto Rican egg nog.” No, it’s its own invention, and it’s especially impressive that it’s something delicious, made mostly with food often considered substandard. (Also it shouldn’t be called Puerto Rican egg nog because there is a Puerto Rican egg nog, it’s called crema de vie.) (Also still don’t call it Puerto Rican egg nog, but a guy on Instagram, @hudsonchef, calls it “Latino pumpkin spice,” and that made me laugh. Here are two recipes I found online that I want to try now: coquito de Ferrero Rocher, and coquito macarons. 

Happy New Year, may you drink something made with sweetened condensed milk and coconut milk and cream of coconut. 🥥

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This newsletter is edited by Katherine Spiers, host of the podcast Smart Mouth.

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