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Cocoanut Filling
2 eggs. Powdered sugar Grated cocoanut Beat egg whites until stiff, add enough powdered sugar to spread. Spread on cake and sprinkle with grated cocoanut. Use for a layer cake, having filling between and on top. 1 cup sugar 1/3 cup flour
A one-minute uncooked icing of the sort common in turn-of-the-century American cake books, where beaten whites and powdered sugar stood in for a boiled frosting. The method is sound in outline but the egg whites are never heated at any stage.
- Raw egg white is the problemNothing in this filling reaches a temperature that would make shell eggs safe: the whites are beaten cold, sugared, spread on a cooled cake and eaten. Raw or lightly handled egg white can carry Salmonella, and a frosting sits at room temperature for hours after it is made. For an uncooked white icing, use a current recipe written for it.
- Powdered sugarPeriod usage varied; in many American books of this date 'powdered' meant a fine granulated sugar, with 'pulverized' closer to what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains up to about 3 percent cornstarch.
- "Cocoanut"The older spelling of coconut. It could mean a whole nut cracked, pared and grated at home, giving moist unsweetened shreds, though packaged desiccated coconut was also available by this date. Modern sweetened flake is drier and sweeter, and will push an already sugary filling further.
- "Enough to spread"No quantity is given, and none can be reconstructed honestly: the sugar-to-white ratio in this style of icing runs anywhere from about 1 to 2 cups of powdered sugar per white depending on how stiff the cook wanted it.
- CoverageThe recipe directs the filling between the layers and on top, which leaves the sides bare; the number of layers is not specified.
Uncooked white icings like this one belong to a family of quick frostings that filled the gap between plain sugar glazes and the fussier boiled or seven-minute icings requiring more care and a steady hand. Community and manufacturer cookbooks of the period, of which Reliable Recipes is one, printed them freely, often with no quantities at all beyond "enough to spread" -- the assumption being that the cook already knew what a spreadable icing felt like. Coconut appears constantly in these books because desiccated shredded coconut is generally said to have become widely available in American groceries in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, turning what had been a laborious tropical ingredient into a pantry staple, and a sprinkling of it was the cheapest way to make a plain layer cake look finished.