There is a beautiful coconut palm just off the edge of my lanai where I was eating lunch a few weeks ago. The coconuts caught my eye, and I wondered who the first person was to think about cracking that nut to see what is inside? By nut standards it is huge, so I can understand the curiosity, but in application breaking this thing open is not an easy endeavor. Bravo for their persistence.
The coconut from the tree is one step removed from the coconut in your local produce department. That one is perfectly round, fibrously brown, and nearly impossible to break open. The ones on the tree are smooth and green before they are ripe. (Is that the right word?) When fully mature they turn brown and ugly, and look more like a misshapen football. It’s odd looking, and nothing about it suggests it could be food.
Back to our curious guy who thought, “I wonder if you can eat that?” It’s a lot of trouble I can tell you that. I’ve seen this done at a luau in Hawaii. They make it look incredibly simple. You just need a sharpened spike stuck in the ground. You slam the coconut husk onto the spike three or four times, turning it a quarter turn or more with each downward blow until the husk just peels away. Don’t get excited. You’re not done.
Now you’re left with the brown, round, and ever so hard coconut inner shell. This is the one you find in the grocery store. It’s here that they take a machete, while holding the nut in their hand, (sounds wrong already, doesn’t it?), and with the blunt side of the machete take a few whacks at it. Just like that they are miraculously holding a coconut broken perfectly in half, with coconut water running through their fingers. Easy peasy.
It looked simple enough. I even YouTubed it, but I’m missing the requisite tools for the job. I have no sharpened spike stuck in the ground. This is Naples, not Lord of the Flies! I also find myself without a machete. If on the off chance I did have one, taking a whack at a coconut in my hand, even with the back side of the blade, is a surefire recipe for needing to break the land speed record to the nearest emergency room!!! I watched that YouTube demonstration again, pouring over the details. It’s just not in my DNA. I was born in Indiana, not the South Pacific.
My tool of choice is a hammer to crack that nut wide open, preferable on a flat rock outside, and not my kitchen counter. Even so, I have to clobber it several times to shatter it into several not so neat pieces. Then I have to score it with a knife, and use that same sharp knife to pry the coconut meat from the shell. As you can see, the entire process is both time consuming and fraught with danger.
Once upon a time some guy was walking the beach, found a coconut, and with profound tenacity, and quite possibly nothing else to do, worked and worked until he broke into that husk. I can imagine his disappointment upon finding another, even harder shell inside that required more ingenuity, and even more time to breach, not knowing if he would be rewarded with a tasty treat or not should he be successful.
We all know how the story ends. We buy our coconut shredded, sealed in a plastic bag that we can open with scissors. Coconut milk comes in a can with a pull tab to open, and coconut water in a cute little juice box with a cap that unscrews. All because one guy was hugely curious. Thank you, whoever you were. Oh, and you know how I know this was a man and not a woman who made this discovery? Because women are smart enough not to go whacking at things in our hands with a machete.