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Angel's Bread
A variety of Cocoanut Cake. 1 cup butter. 2 cups sugar. 3 cups flour. Whites of eight eggs. 1/2 cup sweet milk. 1/2 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar, stirred in the milk. Flavor with vanilla. Bake in jelly-cake pans. 1 grated cocoanut. Spread top and bottom of cake with icing, then put on the cocoanut, and so on till your cake is large as you wish. Ice the whole cake, and sprinkle on cocoanut. Make the icing, three whites to one pound of pulverized sugar, with juice of one lemon.--Mrs. D. R.
A white layer cake leavened with soda and cream of tartar, stacked with fresh grated coconut. The original assumes you know the creaming method and owns a coconut with a husk on it, so a few translations are needed.
- The leavening1/2 teaspoon soda plus 1 teaspoon cream of tartar dissolved in the milk is homemade baking powder, and it begins reacting as soon as the two are wetted together in the milk. Substitute about 1 1/2 teaspoons modern baking powder, or mix the two as written and get the layers into the oven promptly.
- Jelly-cake pansThese are shallow round tins, 8 or 9 inches across, used for thin layers meant to be stacked with filling. This batter will fill four to five of them; bake at 350F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the layers spring back and just begin to pull from the sides.
- Method, which the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar thoroughly, add the milk with the leavening alternately with the flour, then fold in the whites beaten stiff but not dry. Folding last is what keeps a whites-only cake from turning dense.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for.
- One grated cocoanutA fresh coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated meat. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works, about 8 ounces, but it is drier; freshly grated or frozen grated coconut gives the moist texture the recipe is after.
- Pulverized sugarConfectioners' sugar. Three egg whites to a pound of it makes a stiff uncooked icing, thinned by the lemon juice; add the juice a little at a time or it will run off the layers.
- Raw whites in the icingThis icing is never cooked. If it is going to anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites or meringue powder, or make a cooked boiled icing instead.
- Eight yolks left overThe recipe uses whites only. Keep the yolks refrigerated and use them within a day or two for custard, curd or mayonnaise.
- YieldFour to five thin layers, serving 12 to 16. The layers are fragile; assemble on the plate you intend to serve it from.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in the late 1870s, is a collection of contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one arrives as "Mrs. D. R." rather than as a standard formula. Coconut cake became a fixture of Southern celebration baking in the later nineteenth century, as trade made whole coconuts a more reliable, if laborious, purchase; grating one by hand was slow work. The abundance of eggs here is itself a period marker: a cook with her own hens could spend eight whites on one cake and put the yolks to work in the same afternoon's custard.