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Cream for This Cake (One pint of milk yolks)
One pint of milk, yolks of three eggs, one cup sugar, one-half cup flour; mix well the flour, sugar and eggs, and when the milk boils stir them smoothly in it; let it simmer a little while, and when cool add one-half of a grated cocoanut and one teaspoon vanilla; spread the first layer of the cake with this cream, the second with currant jelly, then put on the third cake and cover thick with icing; grate the other half of the cocoanut and sprinkle on top.
This is a flour-thickened pastry cream, written for a three-layer coconut cake and assuming the cook already knows how a boiled custard behaves. A few points are worth spelling out.
- Temper, then boilThe flour, sugar and yolks are meant to be beaten into a smooth paste, then stirred into boiling milk. Whisk a ladle of the hot milk into the paste first, return it to the pan, and keep whisking; dumping the cold paste straight into a boiling pint invites lumps and scrambled yolk.
- "Simmer a little while" means longer than you thinkHalf a cup of flour needs a full minute or two at an active bubble, whisked constantly, or the finished cream tastes of raw starch. It will look alarmingly thick before it is done. Unlike a plain egg custard, the flour protects the yolks, so boiling is required rather than risky.
- MeasuresA pint is two cups of milk. Read the cup as the familiar 8 oz measure, bearing in mind that cups were not yet standardised when this was written; a half cup of flour to a pint of milk gives a stiff, sliceable filling rather than a pouring custard, which is what a stacked layer cake needs.
- CoolingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly on the surface as it cools, or you will beat a skin into the finished cream. Cool it completely before the coconut and vanilla go in, as the recipe directs -- heat drives off vanilla's aroma.
- The cocoanutThe original means a whole fresh coconut, cracked and grated, half into the cream and half over the icing. Fresh grated coconut is wetter and far less sweet than the bagged sweetened flake sold now; unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closer stand-in. A whole nut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated depending on its size, so figure something like 1 1/2 to 2 cups for each half.
- AssemblyCream on the first layer, currant jelly on the second, icing over the whole. Warm the jelly slightly and stir it smooth so it spreads without tearing the crumb, and keep it thin — it is there as a tart counterweight to the coconut, not as a second filling.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 2 1/2 cups of cream before the coconut goes in, which is a generous quantity for the single layer the recipe spreads it on. Because it is an egg-and-milk filling, the assembled cake belongs in the refrigerator and is best within two days.
Flour-thickened boiled custards of this kind — what a French kitchen would call crème pâtissière — ran through nineteenth-century American cookbooks as "cream for cake" or "cream filling," a cheap and sturdy alternative to whipped cream in houses without reliable cold storage. The coconut is a hint of the period: steamship trade is generally credited with making whole coconuts common in American markets over the later decades of the century, and grating one at home was ordinary work. Layering the cream against currant jelly sets the sharp red fruit against sweet custard and white icing so that the cut slice looks as deliberate as it tastes.