Home › Supper › Chocolate and Cocoanut Cake
Chocolate and Cocoanut Cake
Two cups of sugar, one cup of butter, one cup of sour milk, two and one-half cups of flour, yolks of five and whites of two eggs, one-half a cake of grated chocolate, one-half a teaspoon of soda, flavor with vanilla; a little salt.
A late-Victorian butter cake written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the method: cream, alternate, bake. Almost everything a modern baker needs — pan, oven, time, and the coconut of the title — has to be supplied.
- Where is the coconutThe batter contains none. The likeliest explanation is that the coconut belonged to the finish: the three whites left over from the five eggs would have gone into a white icing heaped with grated coconut, so the cake reads chocolate inside and white outside. The recipe as printed gives no icing at all, and without one it is simply a chocolate cake.
- Half a cake of chocolateUnsweetened baking chocolate was sold in scored blocks, and the size of 'a cake' varied, so the quantity is genuinely ambiguous. Against two cups of sugar and two and a half cups of flour, one to two ounces of grated unsweetened chocolate gives a plausible result.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the modern stand-in; a cup of milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice also works. Half a teaspoon of soda to a cup of sour milk is the usual period proportion.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the book assumes a range judged by hand. 350F is a reasonable modern setting. Two 9-inch layers take roughly 25 to 30 minutes; a single loaf or tube pan closer to 45 to 55 minutes.
- Pan and yieldThe quantities make about two 9-inch layers or one 9x13 sheet, serving 12 to 16. Grease and flour, or line with parchment — nineteenth-century tins were buttered and papered for exactly this reason.
- The salt"A little salt" in a recipe of this scale means about half a teaspoon. Butter of the period was often salted to begin with.
- MethodCream the butter and sugar thoroughly, beat in the yolks and the melted or finely grated chocolate, then add the flour and soured milk alternately, and fold in the two beaten whites last. The two whites are doing structural work, so do not overmix after they go in.
Cakes built on sour milk and soda were the standard American home cake through the second half of the nineteenth century, when a household with a milk cow always had clabbered milk on hand and chemical leavening had come to stand alongside — though never entirely displace — the beaten-egg and yeast methods of earlier books, since beaten-egg sponges persisted. The split egg count here — five yolks in, only two whites — is the mark of a thrifty kitchen, and the three reserved whites may well have gone into a white icing to carry the grated coconut, though that is a guess. Coconut had become a familiar grocery item in the United States over the closing decades of the century, first as whole imported nuts to be pierced, drained and grated by hand, then increasingly as packaged shredded and sweetened coconut, and it turns up constantly in supper and tea-table cakes of the period as the plainest way to make a homely cake look festive.