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Cocoa-Nut Cake (To the well-beaten yolks)
To the well-beaten yolks of six eggs, add two cups powdered white sugar, three-fourths cups butter, one of sweet milk, three and a half of flour, one level tea-spoon soda and two of cream tartar, whites of four eggs well beaten; bake in jelly-cake pans. For icing, grate one cocoa-nut, beat whites of two eggs, and add one tea-cup powdered sugar; mix thoroughly with the grated cocoa-nut, and spread evenly on the layers of cake when they are cold.- Miss Nettie Miller, Columbus.
A standard four-egg-yolk layer cake of the 1870s, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than commercial baking powder. The cake batter itself is sound; the coconut icing is not, and that is where the caution applies.
- The icing is uncooked egg whiteTwo raw whites beaten with sugar and grated coconut are spread on cooled cake and never heated. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the sugar concentration is far too low to be preservative. Use a current recipe for the frosting if you want to bake the cake.
- "Powdered" sugarIn 1877 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar creams correctly here; caster sugar is closer still.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne level teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is a homemade baking powder in roughly the classic 1:2 ratio. Sift both thoroughly through the flour, and get the batter into the oven promptly, since the reaction begins as soon as the milk wets it.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk, specified because many recipes in the same book call for sour milk or buttermilk. Do not substitute buttermilk without rebalancing the leavening.
- Jelly-cake pansShallow round tins, 8 or 9 inches across, filled thin. The recipe does not say how many layers; this quantity of batter should give roughly four; grease and flour or line them.
- OvenThe book assumes the cook knows her range. Bake at 350F for about 20 to 25 minutes for layers this thin, until a tester comes out clean and the edges just pull from the tin.
- Egg arithmeticSix yolks and four whites go into the cake, which leaves two whites over — exactly the two the icing calls for.
- Grated cocoa-nutA whole fresh coconut, cracked, peeled and grated, yields roughly 3 to 4 cups. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the nearest shelf substitute, but it is drier and will absorb more moisture from whatever it is bound with.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) is a community book, and this page shows it: the recipe carries the name of its contributor, Miss Nettie Miller of Columbus, as hundreds of others in the volume carry theirs. Coconut was a mark of a special-occasion cake in the 1870s. Whole nuts came north through the Caribbean trade and had to be cracked, pared and grated by hand, which is why so many recipes of the period specify "grate one cocoa-nut" as a step in itself; packaged shredded coconut only became a common grocery item later in the century. The leavening is equally of its moment: measured separately, soda plus cream of tartar was still common in home kitchens that had not yet adopted a canned baking powder, though commercial baking powders were already widely sold by the 1870s.