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Cocoanut Filling and Icing
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar 1/2 cup water 2 egg whites 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, few drops lemon juice 1 cup shredded cocoanut Cook sugar and water over slow fire without stirring until syrup spins a thread; pour slowly over egg whites which have been beaten until stiff; beat until thick enough to spread; add flavoring. Spread between layers and on top of cake. While icing and filling are still soft, sprinkle thickly with cocoanut.
This is an Italian meringue — hot sugar syrup beaten into stiff whites — finished with coconut. The whole thing hinges on the syrup temperature and on working fast once it is made.
- "Spins a thread"Thread stage is 230-235F on a candy thermometer. Take it to the top of that range or a couple of degrees past for an icing that sets firm enough to hold layers; below 230F it stays slack and weeps.
- Do not stirThe instruction is literal. Once the sugar has dissolved, stirring or splashing crystals down the pan wall will seed the syrup and turn the icing grainy. Wash the sides down with a wet brush and leave it alone; the few drops of lemon juice are there as acid to help invert the sugar and discourage the same problem.
- Pouring the syrupA thin steady stream down the inside of the bowl, with the whites already at stiff peaks and the beater running. Syrup landing on the whisk gets flung to the sides and hardens into shards.
- Beat until cool"Thick enough to spread" means the bowl is no longer warm to the hand, roughly 7-10 minutes in a stand mixer. The recipe adds the flavoring at this stage; some of the vanilla will flash off if it goes into a hot meringue.
- CocoanutPackaged shredded coconut of the period was generally dry and unsweetened, close to what is sold today as desiccated or macaroon coconut. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is moister and much sweeter; it works, but the icing is already sugar-heavy, so unsweetened is the truer match.
- Egg whitesThe hot syrup heats the whites but does not reliably pasteurize them. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites or powdered egg white.
- Work quicklyThis icing skins over and stiffens as it stands. Fill, frost and sprinkle the coconut within a few minutes of finishing the beating, exactly as the recipe says, or the coconut will sit on the surface rather than embed.
- YieldRoughly enough for a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake; the recipe directs it between the layers and on top only, so allow extra if you want the sides covered as well.
Boiled icing of this kind was the standard American cake finish from the late nineteenth century until buttercream displaced it, and it appears in commercial baking-powder cookbooks of the era. Its popularity owed something to economics: it uses no butter and no chocolate, only sugar, water and the whites left over from a yolk-rich cake. The coconut is the period marker. Shredded coconut became a cheap pantry staple in the United States once packers began drying and bagging it, with brands such as Schepp's and Dunham's selling it from the 1870s and 1880s, before Franklin Baker's Philadelphia operation; cookbooks of the following decades put it on everything from pies to layer cakes.