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Cocoanut Cakes
Mix thoroughly 2 1/2 cups shredded cocoanut 2/3 cup condensed milk and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Beat 2 egg whites until stiff, combine mixtures, shape into cakes, using a knife and spoon, and allowing 1 rounding tablespoon mixture to each cake. Place on greased tin sheets 1 inch apart. Bake in moderate oven or at 350 degrees F. for 20 minutes.
A three-ingredient coconut macaroon that depends entirely on what kind of canned milk you reach for. Get that right and the rest is straightforward.
- Condensed milk means sweetenedIn 1920s American usage "condensed milk" is the thick sweetened kind sold in tins; evaporated milk is the unsweetened one and was usually named as such. There is no other sugar in this recipe, so evaporated milk will give you flat, bland, weeping mounds.
- CocoanutShredded coconut of the period was often sold moist and sweetened, close to today's sweetened flaked coconut, though unsweetened desiccated coconut was also on the market. Desiccated coconut is drier and will absorb more of the milk; if you use it, expect a stiffer mix and a less sweet cake.
- OvenThe recipe gives its own number, 350°F, which is what "moderate" meant. Twenty minutes browns the exposed coconut tips while the centres stay soft; take them out when the peaks are golden rather than waiting out the clock.
- Folding the whitesBeaten whites lighten a mixture that is otherwise dense and sticky. Fold them in rather than stirring, and shape and bake promptly so the foam does not deflate.
- Greased tin sheetsCoconut and condensed milk together caramelise and weld to the pan. Parchment on the sheet is far more reliable than grease alone, and lets the cakes lift off intact.
- ShapingA rounding tablespoon is more than level but short of heaping; the knife-and-spoon method just means pushing the mix off one with the other. Wet the spoon between cakes to stop it dragging.
- YieldNo yield is given; expect roughly two dozen cakes, depending on how generous the spoonfuls are. They keep two or three days in a tin and are better on day one, when the outside is still crisp against a chewy centre.
This is a macaroon with the labour taken out of it. The older form, made across Europe from the sixteenth century onward, bound ground almonds with egg white and sugar and required careful beating; here a tin of sweetened condensed milk supplies sugar, moisture and binding in one move. Condensed milk had been commercially canned in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century and was ordinary pantry stock by the 1920s, and manufacturers are often said to have promoted recipes like this one to widen its use beyond coffee and infant feeding. These are cakes a household could produce in a few minutes for guests, without a cake tin, a creaming stage, or much judgment about oven heat.