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Cocoanut Frosting
Whites of three eggs, one grated cocoanut; beat the sugar and eggs together, spread on the cake and sprinkle the cocoanut over thickly. This will make a whiter frosting than stirring in the cocoanut.
An uncooked egg-white icing of the sort that filled nineteenth-century cake chapters. Two things stand between it and a modern kitchen: the sugar quantity is missing entirely, and the eggs are never heated.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites are beaten with sugar, spread on a finished cake and left to dry in air. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the frosting sits at room temperature for hours or days while it sets. For an uncooked icing today a current recipe using pasteurized whites or meringue powder should be used instead.
- The sugar is unmeasured"Beat the sugar and eggs together" gives no quantity at all. Comparable period frostings commonly ran on the order of a cup of sifted sugar to a white, though the proportion varied from book to book, and the writer appears to have assumed the cook already knew. Treating the omission as a small gap to be guessed at is how these icings end up either soupy or unspreadable.
- What kind of sugar was meantNineteenth-century "sugar" in a frosting context generally meant pulverized or powdered loaf sugar, which did not carry the cornstarch modern confectioners' sugar contains. The two need not behave identically, and the difference may affect the finished texture.
- One grated cocoanutA whole mature coconut yields roughly three to four cups of grated meat, unsweetened and quite moist. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is a different ingredient — sweeter, drier, and coarser — and would throw the sugar balance further off in a recipe that already gives none.
- Why sprinkle rather than stirThe note at the end is the real point of the entry. Stirring the coconut through tints and dulls the icing, while scattering it over the wet surface keeps the white beneath visible; that is the whiteness the writer is claiming. The technique works whatever the icing beneath it.
- No cake, no yieldThe original assumes a cake is already made and cooled. Three whites' worth of frosting suits roughly one two-layer cake or a single sheet, though the missing sugar makes even that an estimate.
Coconut frosting belonged to the later nineteenth-century American company table, by which time whole coconuts were reaching northern markets by sea in quantity -- a cook was expected to pierce, drain, crack and grate one by hand, which is why recipes count in whole nuts rather than cups. Uncooked icings like this one competed with boiled frostings made by pouring hot syrup over beaten whites; the uncooked version was faster and, as this writer argues, whiter, and whiteness was much prized in an era when a snowy cake signalled refined sugar and a careful hand.