Frosting
The other half of the cocoanut to be put in the frosting, beat whites of three eggs very light, add one-half pound of powdered sugar.
This is the frosting half of a two-part coconut cake entry — the other half of the grated nut went into the cake itself. As written it is an uncooked meringue-style icing, and that is the problem.
- Why it fails todayThe egg whites are beaten with sugar and never heated at any stage. Raw or lightly handled shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella, and a spread that sits at room temperature on a cake for hours is exactly the condition under which any contamination multiplies. Nineteenth-century cooks accepted that risk; there is no reason to. Use a current frosting recipe.
- "Cocoanut"The book means a whole fresh coconut, cracked, drained, pared and grated by hand — roughly 3 to 4 cups of moist shreds from one nut, so half a nut is about 1½ to 2 cups. Bagged sweetened flake is a different product: much drier, much sweeter, and it would throw off the sugar balance here.
- The sugar ratioHalf a pound of powdered sugar is about 1¾ to 2 cups, which is thin for three whites by modern standards; many uncooked icings call for more sugar per white than this. The original produces a soft, slack frosting that relies on the coconut for body.
- "Powdered sugar" in period booksIt did not always mean today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. In many nineteenth-century texts it meant loaf sugar crushed and sifted fine — closer to what we would call superfine or caster sugar. The distinction matters because modern confectioners' sugar contains starch and sets firmer.
- YieldThree whites and half a pound of sugar, plus the coconut, should be roughly enough to cover the top and sides of a single 8- or 9-inch layer cake, or to fill and top two thin layers sparingly.
Coconut cake with a white boiled or uncooked icing became a fixture of American company baking over the second half of the nineteenth century, as whole coconuts were shipped north and sold cheaply in eastern seaboard markets. The fruit was a small ceremony in itself: pierce the eyes, drain the water, crack the shell, pare the brown skin, then grate the meat on a hand grater — laborious enough that a household might split one nut between cake and frosting rather than waste any of it, which is what this entry assumes. The uncooked white-of-egg icing was the plainest of the period's several options, quicker than the boiled sugar-syrup meringue and requiring no thermometer or sugar-boiling judgement — which is also why it went onto the table raw.