Home › Novel Cocoanut Recipes › Sugarless Cocoanut Frosting
Sugarless Cocoanut Frosting
Beat one egg-white till stiff, add two tablespoons. honey or sirup and as much Dromedary Cocoanut as it will hold (about one-third of a cup).
A three-ingredient uncooked meringue frosting from the wartime sugar-saving pages. The problem is structural rather than a matter of technique: the egg white is never heated at any point, and nothing in the method brings it to a safe temperature.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe white is beaten, mixed with honey and coconut, and used as a frosting. It is not baked, boiled with syrup, or held over hot water. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and an uncooked frosting left at room temperature is a poor place for it.
- Honey is not a preservative hereUndiluted honey is inhospitable to bacteria, but two tablespoons beaten into an egg white and loose coconut is diluted well below that point. The mixture behaves like any other moist, low-acid food.
- Honey and infantsHoney should not be given to children under one year old because of the risk of infant botulism. That applies to uncooked frosting as much as to a spoonful from the jar.
- No safe substitute is impliedCooked meringue frostings exist — Italian and Swiss methods bring the whites to temperature with hot syrup or over a water bath — but they are different recipes with different ratios. Use a current one rather than adapting this.
- On the ingredients themselves"Sirup" in this period generally means corn or cane syrup, and Dromedary Cocoanut was a packaged shredded coconut sold in a can or carton. A third of a cup of coconut to one white is roughly what a single white will carry before it collapses.
"Sugarless" recipes like this one belong to the American home front of 1917-18, when the Food Administration asked households to conserve sugar, wheat and fats for shipment abroad, and honey, corn syrup and molasses were promoted as patriotic substitutes. Dromedary was the brand name of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates and for shredded coconut sold in sealed packages -- a convenience product that let a cook skip the work of cracking, draining and grating a fresh nut. Booklets of this kind were given away or sold cheaply by the manufacturer, and their purpose was less to teach cooking than to suggest as many uses for a single pantry item as possible. Uncooked meringue frostings were common at the time and appear in general cookbooks of the era as well, well before eggs were understood as a routine source of foodborne illness.