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Cocoa-Nut Spongecakes
Take a large fresh cocoa-nut, remove the brown skin, and grate the white part on a perfectly clean, bright grater as finely as possible; beat the yolks of six eggs, and be sure that they are perfectly fresh; stir in gradually, and mix thoroughly, half a pound of sifted sugar, a pinch of salt, half a tea-spoonful of grated lemon-rind, and the yolks of the eggs. Beat the mixture for a quarter of an hour, then add, by degrees, a quarter of a pound of flour, and the grated cocoa-nut, and last of all, the whites of the eggs whisked till firm. Line square tins with buttered paper, pour in the mixture, and bake the cakes immediately, in a brisk oven. Do not open the door of the oven until the cakes are baked. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for one moderate-sized cake, or two small ones.
A pre-baking-powder sponge: all the lift comes from eggs, so the beating and the closed oven door are the whole method. A few of the quantities and the oven description need translating.
- The hinge: whipped whites, folded lastThere is no chemical raising agent here. The whites must be whisked to firm peaks and folded in, then the batter goes straight into the tins and the oven — any delay or overmixing at that stage and the cake bakes flat and dense.
- "Brisk oven"The book supplies no figure; brisk in Victorian usage is generally taken to mean somewhere around 400–425F. For a fat-free sponge baked half an hour, modern practice would run 350–375F; at the hotter end the crust sets and colours long before the centre is done.
- Imperial weightsHalf a pound of sifted sugar is 8 oz, about 1 1/8 cups caster sugar. A quarter pound of flour is 4 oz, a scant cup measured by scooping — weigh it if you can, since the flour-to-egg ratio is what keeps this light.
- The fresh coconutAs written the recipe grates the whole white part of a large nut, a generous amount against 8 oz sugar and 4 oz flour; 4–5 oz of finely grated meat is enough if you prefer a lighter cake. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works, though it is drier and coarser -- soak it briefly in warm milk and squeeze it out before folding in.
- A garbled sentenceThe yolks are beaten at the start, then "the yolks of the eggs" appear again in the list of things to stir in. It is one lot of yolks, added to the sugar, salt and lemon rind.
- "Beat for a quarter of an hour"That is fifteen minutes by hand to get the yolk-and-sugar base pale and thick. A stand mixer on high does the same in four or five minutes; you want it to fall from the whisk in a ribbon.
- Buttered paper and tinsSubstitute parchment, buttered or not as you like. The recipe gives no dimensions beyond "square tins"; an 8-inch square tin, or two 6-inch tins for the small version, suits these quantities.
- Don't open the doorSound advice, and worth keeping: an egg-foam batter that has not yet set will collapse from the draught. Check at 25 minutes and no earlier.
- Yield and costOne 8-inch cake, cutting into 8–10 slices. The 1s. 4d. is a period costing — an imported coconut and six eggs were not a trivial outlay in a Victorian household.
A sponge like this one was a test of technique rather than shopping: sugar, eggs, flour and patient beating, with no baking powder to rescue a badly whisked white. What suggests a later nineteenth-century date is the coconut. Whole nuts arrived in British ports from the West Indies and Ceylon in growing numbers through the middle decades of the century, and the machine-dried desiccated coconut that would soon dominate British baking is generally traced to Ceylon processors in the 1880s. Before that, a cook wanting coconut had to buy the nut, crack it, pare the brown testa off the meat and grate it herself; wet white flesh will also pick up rust and stale fat from a neglected grater, which may be why the recipe asks for a "perfectly clean, bright" one.