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Cocoanut Filling
1 cup powdered sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 cup grated cocoanut juice and rind 1 lemon Mix cornstarch, sugar and egg yolks; add milk, butter, and cook twenty minutes, stirring occasionally; add lemon rind, juice and cocoanut.
A cooked lemon-coconut custard for layer cakes, of the type Lowney's used between chocolate cake layers. The printed ingredient list is incomplete, so read the method carefully before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe list names sugar, cornstarch, coconut and lemon, but the method calls for egg yolks, milk and butter that were never listed. Comparable fillings of the period use about 2 egg yolks, 1 cup milk and 1 tablespoon butter; the original gives no figures, so treat those as a reconstruction rather than the author's amounts.
- Cook it over waterCook it gently -- twenty minutes over direct heat risks scrambling the yolks and scorching the starch. The recipe does not say what vessel to use, but the long timing and the instruction to stir only occasionally would both suit a double boiler.
- CocoanutGrated coconut in 1907 meant fresh meat from the shell, or the unsweetened desiccated coconut sold in bulk. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will push the filling noticeably sweeter; use unsweetened if you want the lemon to read.
- Powdered sugarPeriod "powdered" sugar is finely ground granulated, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today. Use granulated, since the recipe already supplies its own cornstarch.
- Lemon last, and for a reasonThe acid goes in after cooking. Added early it weakens the cornstarch bond and the filling will loosen as it stands.
- Thickness and coolingCook until it mounds on the spoon and no raw starch flavor remains, then cool completely before spreading. Warm filling will slide out from between cake layers.
- YieldRoughly enough to fill one two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake, depending on what quantities you settle on for the unlisted milk and eggs. It is an egg custard, so keep it covered and refrigerated and use it within a couple of days.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of its era it exists partly to sell an ingredient — a great many of its recipes lean on Lowney's cocoa and chocolate, though the book also covers general cookery. Fillings like this one earn their place by pairing with those chocolate cakes rather than by containing chocolate themselves. Coconut had become common in American home baking by the 1890s, after firms in Philadelphia and Brooklyn began shredding and drying imported nuts commercially, sparing cooks the work of cracking and grating their own. The construction here — a cornstarch-and-yolk custard sharpened with lemon and bulked with coconut — is a standard cake-filling formula of the period, varied by whatever flavoring was to hand, and the incomplete ingredient list suggests the proofreading of these promotional volumes was uneven.