RECIPE: Coquito
Often referred to as "Puerto Rican eggnog," I would instead call coquito decidedly its own thing. And it's amazing.
A caveat I place at the top of every recipe: I never planned on putting recipes in my Substack because I don’t think of myself as the type of mom who has great recipes to offer the world, honestly. But I realized while writing about the holidays that the recipes I make with my family are a deeper representation of who we are than I’d previously understood. I lived in Ecuador for about three years, starting when I was 15, and some of those meals feel like childhood nostalgia in a way that will never change. The same goes for my North Carolina comfort foods. And having kids of Puerto Rican heritage has brought me into a whole new world of Latin American cooking, with some overlaps to Ecuadorian food (see tostones, or patacones, as I still call them), but mostly new dishes.
All that to say, none of these recipes are included to claim some kind of authority over them; I’m obviously not the expert on any of them. They’re just a way of documenting my the multicultural family I’m building, and the ways we’re building food traditions within this family. Feel free to take these recipes as inspiration; don’t take them as fact or within any expectation of historical accuracy.
So, coquito. I first tried coquito when M’s dad’s side of the family came for Thanksgiving a few years ago. His sister and her husband took over the kitchen, blending round after round of coquito in my little Magic Bullet (the only blending option I had). My favorite memory of this operation was when the lid of the Magic Bullet got stuck, blending frantically for far too long, while J’s sister wrestled with the lid. Finally it sprang off while the mixture continuing blending, spraying the ceiling and walls with bright white coquito.
That mishap notwithstanding, we wound up with a dozen Mason jars of coquito in our fridge, which J and I struggled to finish on our own after his family went back to Florida post-holidays. The next year, we were determined to make the creamy drink for my family at Christmastime, and since then it’s become a tradition. We even made coquito—along with tostones and some other Puerto Rican snacks—for M’s school’s International Food Night last year.
So here’s the recipe I’ve used most recently, combining J’s sister’s recipe with other ingredients I’ve happened upon—most importantly, vanilla ice cream ;)
INGREDIENTS:
2 15 oz cans cream of coconut
2 13.5 oz cans coconut milk
8 oz evaporated milk
28 oz melted vanilla ice cream
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
cinnamon sticks (1 per drink)
Bacardi white rum
TO MAKE:
Puree liquids, ice cream, and spices.
Add rum and let chill for several hours.
Serve with cinnamon sticks.
A note: If you sample this coquito before adding the rum, you’ll notice it’s quite sweet. The rum balances the sweetness out nicely, but if you want to drink it without alcohol, I’d personally add less vanilla ice cream. However, I’m also the person who asks for half the normal number of pumps in any holiday coffee drink, so maybe I’m just less excited by sweetness than most people.