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Meringue Cakes
Short pastry 1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 large eggs, beaten 2 tablespoons milk 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut ½ teaspoon baking powder 1 cup flour ½ teaspoon vanilla Meringue Roll pastry out and cut it into rounds or line tartlet tins with it. Beat butter and sugar together, add eggs, milk, cocoanut and flour sifted with baking powder, then add extract. Mix well, place in spoonfuls in pastry and bake in a quick oven 12 to 15 minutes.
Cover with meringue, sprinkle with cocoanut and brown lightly in the oven.
A coconut-butter filling baked in pastry shells, then crowned with meringue. Two of the listed "ingredients" — the short pastry and the meringue — come with no quantities at all, which was normal in a branded recipe booklet that assumed you already had both in your repertoire.
- Quick ovenA quick oven is conventionally glossed as roughly 400-450F. For small tartlets, the lower end of that range is safer; the pastry rim colors fast and the coconut filling only needs to set.
- Second bake for the meringueDo not return the tarts to a 450F oven under meringue — it will scorch before the interior sets. Meringue is browned at 350F for a few minutes, or under a broiler watched constantly.
- The unquantified meringueFor a dozen tartlets, 2 egg whites beaten stiff with about 4 tablespoons sugar is a workable amount. Beat the whites to soft peaks first, then add the sugar gradually.
- Short pastryPlain shortcrust: roughly 1½ cups flour to 1/2 cup fat with cold water to bind. The tarts are not blind-baked here, so roll thin and keep the dough cold so the base cooks through under a wet filling.
- CocoanutDromedary Cocoanut was packaged shredded coconut, moister and finer than most modern packaged shred, and period packaged coconut was commonly sweetened. Sweetened flake works; if you use unsweetened, expect a drier, less candied filling.
- Baking powder in 1½ teaspoons1½ teaspoons to a single cup of flour is generous by modern measure. Reduce to 1 teaspoon and the filling will still lift.
- Filling by spoonfulsThe batter is thick and rises. Fill the shells no more than two-thirds, or it will dome over the pastry edge and leave nowhere to anchor the meringue.
- YieldAbout 12 tartlets in standard 2½-inch tins, or 8 in larger rounds. Best the day they are made — meringue on a moist filling softens overnight.
Dromedary was the trade name of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates and for packaged shredded coconut, and this booklet belongs to the enormous genre of manufacturer-issued recipe pamphlets that shaped American home baking from the 1890s onward: every recipe names the brand, and the recipes themselves are simple enough that the product does the distinguishing. The spelling "cocoanut" — usually explained as a false analogy with cocoa — was standard in English cookbooks through the nineteenth century and only gradually gave way to "coconut," though it persisted in American commercial usage well into the twentieth century, Dromedary's own labels among them, so it is no reliable guide to date. The dish itself is a small-scale version of the coconut tart family found across British and American baking, where a butter-sugar-egg filling carries desiccated coconut in a pastry case; the meringue lid is a familiar finish on such tarts, though the filling here takes whole eggs.