Coconut-pistachio laddoos 🥥

Spheres of sugar (and coconut) made in quick time

Hey there! My name is Apoorva Sripathi, I’m a writer, editor, and artist. This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for chewy coconut laddoos scented with vanilla and cardamom. I hope you’ll give it a go! Recipe adapted from Dassana’s Veg Recipes.

I have begun, more and more, to identify with Nigel Slater’s declaration¹ that “Not every meal needs to end with something sweet, but it is rarely a bad idea.” I still firmly place myself in the savoury/salty flavour encampment, but there are days when your heart cries out for pudding.

Yearning for something sweet is not new by any means, but it is new to me. And because I live without an oven or a microwave, baking a cookie is out of the question. A bar of chocolate just seems too ordinary². I could buy a piece of cake from the nearby bakery but then who would I be if I don’t devote all my time to cooking one dish and structuring all my time around that ritual? I sustain my body through food, and my mind through cooking. I write because I don’t know any other way to live. This is how I exist in this world, seeking abundance wherever possible.

Three years ago, I spoke to Alicia Kennedy for her newsletter on abundance noting that both banana and coconut trees spell abundance, and recounting how I have used almost every part of each tree. I’ll be fed for life, I said. And I always discover something new about it each time. My mother once told me about how her family used banana bracts, those brilliantly maroon-pink-crimson³ leaves that peel off, as plates when she was younger. They were disposable without the need to specifically engineer more of it because more of it was abundant and readily available.

A coconut tree is also abundance, providing food and fuel to anyone who stands before it. I see at least ten coconut trees on walks around my neighbourhood, their numbers dwindling as concrete structures escalate. Every coconut that comes through our kitchen is unceremoniously shaved, the meat shredded and frozen for later use, the fibres employed to scrub vessels, then discarded back to the earth. What is sown, shall return — it makes sense.

I have borrowed this quality of abundance for my recipe. The lavishness of the coconut meets the opulence of condensed milk, and once the marriage is complete, the mixture is rolled into tiny spheres (or balls, if you will) and then rolled into another mixture — of pistachio and coconut (that is toasted). This is a ‘no holds barred recipe’ in that it is abundantly sugar. I am aware of the evils of sugar that is making the rounds on social media and the alternative desserts that take its place. This is the opposite of that. This is unapologetic joy, saccharine in both flavour and vision, and abundance (of course). You can make many balls of this and take it to a dinner party⁴ on short notice. You can make this for someone’s birthday if you’re not too keen on baking a cake. You could make this because it’s too hot to make anything else. Or just because it’s a good idea.