Cocoanut Cake
One teacup cocoanut, one pound flour, one-half pound butter, one pound sugar, one-half pint milk, yolks of six eggs and three whites beaten separately, three teaspoons baking powder, mix one half of the cocoanut with the cake.
A plain butter cake of the old proportional type — a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, half a pound of butter — with coconut worked through the batter and the rest, by implication, scattered over the top. No method, pan or oven is given, so the cook is expected to supply them.
- The measurements in cupsA pound of flour is roughly 3½ to 4 cups; a pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups granulated; half a pound of butter is 2 sticks (1 cup). A half pint of milk is 1 cup, and a teacup of coconut is about ¾ to 1 cup — teacups of the period ran smaller than a modern measuring cup.
- What to do with the other halfThe recipe says to mix half the coconut into the cake and then falls silent. The remainder is presumably for the top, though the text does not say so; an icing of some kind would be the usual vehicle.
- Method is assumedThis is a creaming-method cake: beat butter and sugar until pale, add the yolks, then alternate the flour (sifted with the baking powder) with the milk, fold in the beaten whites last, and the coconut with them.
- Six yolks, three whitesLikely deliberate rather than an error: the extra yolks give a richer, yellower, closer crumb, and the beaten whites give lift. What was to become of the three unused whites the recipe does not say.
- The coconutThis could mean fresh coconut grated at home, moist and barely sweet, or the packaged shredded coconut then coming onto the market. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is wetter and much sweeter — unsweetened desiccated is the closer match, and if you use it, consider a spoonful of milk more.
- Pan and ovenNeither is given. A batter built on a pound of flour will fill two or three 9-inch layer pans or one large tube pan; around 350F for roughly 30 minutes for layers, or 55 to 65 minutes for a tube pan, is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to a pound of flour is a reasonable modern ratio, and there is no obvious need to reduce it.
- YieldA substantial cake: 12 to 16 servings from the full quantity.
Coconut cake belongs to the era when shredded coconut became a fixture of American home baking. Earlier, a cook bought a whole coconut, cracked it, pared and grated it — laborious work that made the cake a Sunday or company dish. Commercially prepared shredded coconut, sold in tins and packets from the later nineteenth century, is generally credited with turning it into something a household could produce without ceremony, and coconut cakes multiply in cookbooks from that point on. If the recipe sits under Supper in this book, that is unremarkable: in a period when supper was the lighter evening meal, a sweet cake with tea was a perfectly ordinary way to end the day, and the compilers of these books drew no firm line between cake for dessert and cake for supper.