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Coffee Filling
Use rule for Cocoanut Filling, substituting one half cup black coffee for cocoanut, omitting lemon, and cooking after addition of coffee until mixture thickens. 1 cup sugar cup cornstarch 1 tablespoon butter
A cornstarch-thickened cake filling built on another entry in the book, with the ingredient list reduced to a bare list and at least one fraction lost in printing. Read it as a technique rather than a formula.
- The missing fraction"cup cornstarch" has clearly dropped its fraction in typesetting. Comparable cornstarch fillings of the period commonly use something in the region of a quarter to a third of a cup against a cup of sugar, but the original number cannot be recovered from the page as printed.
- What the base recipe suppliedThe Cocoanut Filling rule this points to is where the liquid and its proportion live. Without that page you are missing the proportion of liquid, which is the part that decides whether the filling slices or slumps.
- "Black coffee"Coffee without milk or cream, brewed strong. Half a cup of ordinary drip coffee will read as faint once sugar and starch are in; use a concentrated brew or espresso if you want the flavor to carry.
- The hinge: cook it out after the coffee goes inThat is the whole instruction. Adding half a cup of extra liquid to a thickened starch base thins it and dilutes the gelatinized starch, so it must come back to a full boil and thicken again or the filling will weep between the cake layers.
- Cornstarch and boilingCornstarch needs to reach a boil to thicken fully, but prolonged hard boiling breaks it back down and thins it. Bring it to a boil, hold it there a minute while stirring, and take it off.
- Omitting the lemonAcid slightly weakens cornstarch, so dropping it does the filling no harm; the recipe simply directs it. The tablespoon of butter listed here is what gives the gloss and body.
- YieldRoughly enough to fill one two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Cool it to room temperature, with a sheet of plastic on the surface, before spreading, or it will soak the crumb.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, as the sort of promotional cookbook that food companies produced in quantity in the early twentieth century: a full general cookbook that also kept the firm's cocoa on the pantry shelf. Its dessert chapter runs on the boiled-starch principle that dominated American home baking before commercial pudding mixes, where one "rule" for a cornstarch filling is written out once and then varied by swapping the flavoring, which is exactly what this entry does. Coffee as a dessert flavoring, distinct from coffee as a drink, belonged to the same family of fashionable turn-of-the-century flavors as caramel, maple and chocolate, and appeared in cake fillings, ice creams and blancmanges. The shorthand instruction to "use rule for" a neighboring recipe is characteristic of the period and served as a space-saving convention.