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Cocoa-Nut Cake (One cup butter three of sugar)
One cup butter, three of sugar, one of sweet milk, four and a half of flour, four eggs with whites beaten to a stiff froth, a teaspoon soda, two of cream tartar, one grated cocoa-nut. - Mrs. J. Holland, New Castle, Ind.
A large creamed butter cake in the plain nineteenth-century style: the ingredients are listed, the method assumed. Everything below is the missing method.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes often called for. Use whole milk; the acid here comes from cream of tartar, not the dairy.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to four teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. Sift both thoroughly through the flour, since it acts as soon as it wets and will not wait for a slow cook.
- EggsFour eggs, separated: yolks beaten into the creamed butter and sugar, whites whipped stiff and folded in last, after the flour and milk. That folding is what keeps a cake this heavy with butter and coconut from turning dense.
- One grated cocoa-nutA whole fresh coconut, cracked, the brown skin pared off the meat, and the white grated: about 3 to 4 cups loosely packed. Substitute the same volume of unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind, which will push an already sweet cake over.
- FlourFour and a half cups by the old scoop-and-level habit is around 20 oz. Modern all-purpose flour is generally stronger than the softer wheat flours of the period, so measure by weight if you can and mix only until the flour disappears.
- Pan and ovenThis is a big batter. Divide between two greased and lined 9x5 loaf tins or three 9-inch round layers. Bake at 350F, about 55 to 65 minutes for loaves and 25 to 30 for layers, testing with a skewer.
- If you want it as a layer cakePeriod cocoa-nut cakes of this kind were often finished with a boiled white icing and more grated coconut pressed over the top and sides. The recipe as printed stops at the batter.
- YieldRoughly 24 to 30 servings across two loaves. It keeps four or five days well wrapped; the coconut holds moisture.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of Ohio church and community compilations, and pages like this one are essentially a mailbag: a name, a town, and a list of proportions that any woman who had baked a pound cake could fill in for herself. Coconut was a luxury becoming an everyday item in this period. Whole nuts were shipped north from the Caribbean and were cheap enough by the 1870s that a grated one could go into a family cake, while packaged desiccated coconut was beginning to appear from American processors around this time and would largely replace hand-grating by the end of the century. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing dates the recipe too: commercial baking powders existed, but many cooks still combined the acid and alkali themselves, both from thrift and from suspicion that bought powders were adulterated.