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Cocoanut Cake (Teaspoons baking powder)
2/3 cup Cottolene. 3 eggs. 3 cups flour. 5 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1 cup milk. 1/2 teaspoon each lemon and vanilla.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add one cup sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Beat yolks thick and light, add remaining cup sugar gradually, continue beating. Combine mixtures. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt. Add to first mixture alternately with milk. Add vanilla and fold in the whites of eggs beaten stiff and dry. Turn into two well-greased, square cake pans and bake fifteen minutes in a moderate oven. Spread one layer thickly with Boiled Frosting, sprinkle heavily with fresh grated cocoanut, cover with remaining layer. Spread top and sides with frosting, and sprinkle with cocoanut before frosting glazes. 2 cups sugar.
The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete — the fat, flour and eggs are named in the method but their quantities are missing or stranded (the "2 cups sugar" arrives at the end). Read the method first and treat the amounts as needing judgement rather than transcription.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim text gives no weight for the Cottolene, no measure of flour, and no egg count, though all three are called for in the process. Five teaspoons of baking powder points to roughly 3 cups of flour, and the two-cup sugar and one-cup milk proportions suggest about 3/4 cup fat and 4 eggs, separated — but that is inference, not what the page says.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil stiffened with beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company and long discontinued. Substitute an equal amount of vegetable shortening, or butter if you want more flavour; butter will give a slightly denser crumb.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Two square pans of this batter may well need longer than the fifteen minutes given; start checking at 20 minutes.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons is generous by modern standards. With current double-acting powder, 3 to 4 teaspoons for 3 cups of flour is plenty, and less avoids the metallic edge that overleavening leaves.
- Two sugar additionsThe split is deliberate: one cup creamed into the fat, one beaten into the yolks. Beating the yolks with sugar until "thick and light" means to the ribbon stage, pale and falling in a thick band, which does much of the aeration here.
- Folding the whites"Stiff and dry" is period language for firm peaks. Do not beat past the point where the foam looks grainy or it will break up as you fold and the cake will bake heavy.
- Boiled frostingA hot sugar syrup beaten into egg whites — the same construction as an Italian meringue. It sets with a thin crust, which is why the coconut must go on immediately, "before frosting glazes."
- Fresh grated coconutThe recipe assumes a whole nut, cracked and grated, which is moist and only faintly sweet. Packaged sweetened shredded coconut will make the finished cake noticeably sweeter; unsweetened desiccated coconut is closer, and can be freshened with a spoonful of milk.
- YieldTwo square layers, cutting into 9 to 12 pieces. The boiled frosting is best eaten the day it is made; it turns crumbly after a day or two.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and issued by the makers of Cottolene, which is why a cottonseed-and-suet shortening appears in place of butter or lard throughout the book — it is a cookbook and an advertisement at once, from the decade when industrial vegetable fats were fighting for a place in the American pantry. The cake itself is a straightforward turn-of-the-century layer cake, distinguished only by its finish: fresh grated coconut was a mark of a special-occasion table, since it meant buying, cracking, draining and grating a whole nut shipped up from the tropics. Coconut had become widely available in northern American cities in the later nineteenth century, and pre-shredded packaged coconut was already sold by this period, but recipes of this rank still specify "fresh grated" to signal the better version of the dish.