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Merry Christmas Cake
2 cups sugar. 1 cup corn starch. 2 cups flour. 1 cup butter. 1/2 cup sweet milk. Whites of 8 eggs. 2 teaspoonful baking powder. Bake in jelly-cake pans. Between each layer when done, on sides and top, spread icing, with grated cocoanut. A very pretty dish.--Mrs. McG.
A white coconut layer cake written in the shorthand of 1879, when a cook was assumed to know the creaming method without being told. The proportions are sound; only the method and the equipment need translating.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, add the milk alternately with the sifted flour, cornstarch and baking powder, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last. Folding the whites in at the end is what keeps a cake this heavy in butter light.
- Jelly-cake pansThese were shallow round tins, roughly 8 to 9 inches across and an inch or so deep, meant for thin layers. The batter will fill three modern 9-inch round pans or four if you want the taller stack the recipe implies.
- OvenNo temperature is given because there was no dial. Bake at 350F; thin layers will be done in 18 to 25 minutes, when the centre springs back.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- CornstarchA full cup of it alongside the flour lowers the gluten and gives the fine, tender, very white crumb these cakes were prized for. Measure it by spooning and levelling rather than scooping, or the cake will turn out dry.
- Eight egg whitesAbout one cup. The eight yolks left over could go into boiled custard, gold cake or mayonnaise.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for three cups of flour and cornstarch is on the light side by modern reckoning, and the baking powders of the period were single-acting and less reliable than modern ones. Two and a half teaspoons of modern powder is closer to the intended lift.
- The icingProbably a plain boiled white icing or a confectioners' sugar icing, spread while still soft enough to catch the coconut. Frost each layer, then the sides and top, and press grated coconut on before the surface sets.
- CoconutFresh grated coconut is what is meant, and it is moister and far less sweet than packaged sweetened flake. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, briefly moistened, comes nearer than the sweetened kind.
- YieldA three- or four-layer cake serving 12 to 16. It keeps two days under a cover; the boiled icing seals the crumb.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its recipes end in a set of initials rather than a name -- Mrs. McG. would have been known to the book's first readers. The cake itself belongs to the great age of the white layer cake, made possible by two things that were still fairly new in an American kitchen: commercial baking powder, sold widely from the 1850s and 60s, and cheap cornstarch, which manufacturers promoted hard as a cake ingredient for the pale, fine crumb it produced. Coconut was the festive touch. Whole nuts came north from the Caribbean trade and had to be cracked, drained and grated by hand, which made a coconut cake conspicuously a holiday effort rather than a weeknight one -- which may well be the source of the name, and hence the closing note that it makes a very pretty dish.