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Havana Cream Cake
8 ounces of fresh grated cocoanut. 1 pound of sugar. 4 large oranges. 2 lemons. 4 ounces of butter. 6 yolks and 2 whole eggs.
Grate the rinds and squeeze the juice of the oranges and lemons into the sugar and bring it to a boil, making a flavored syrup. Throw in the butter, then the cocoanut, and boil 5 minutes. Stir in the eggs and cook slowly till thick. Spread between layers of snow cake.
Then they are strange the way they exclaim when they burn up a cake in the stove. Once we heard a lady sing, "Gee woicks gee whilikens, the dordrotted thing's gone blackernaniggerbaby!" That was at the toll house at Shippingsport near Louisville, as we were going through the locks twenty-seven years ago last anniversary, and anybody could know it was a cake burnt up by the black smell that came across the canal. Now one of us fellows would only have remarked dam kind of quietly and lighted our pipe. In fact, you have to bake these white cake sheets with scarcely any color at all to look well with colored creams between and icing on top.
This is a coconut-citrus curd meant to be spread between thin white cake layers, padded out with one of the author's canal-boat digressions. The cooking method is the whole of the difficulty: it is an egg-thickened filling and it will scramble if you let it boil.
- The hinge: eggs go in off the boilThe syrup and coconut boil for five minutes, but once the yolks are stirred in the mixture must never return to a boil. Cook it over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon and leaves a clean track; around 170-175F is where it thickens without curdling.
- Fresh grated coconutEight ounces of freshly grated meat is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups loosely packed; a medium coconut will generally supply this and often more, so yields vary. Packaged sweetened flake is a poor substitute here because the pound of sugar already carries the whole load; use unsweetened frozen or desiccated coconut, and if desiccated, let it steep in the hot syrup a few minutes to rehydrate.
- Citrus quantitiesFour large oranges and two lemons give roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups juice plus the zest. Grate the zest before juicing, and add it to the sugar as directed so the oils are drawn out; strain out seeds and pulp if you want a smooth filling.
- "Snow cake"A period name for a plain white cake made with egg whites only, baked in thin sheets or layers. Any modern white layer cake serves. The author's closing point is the practical one: bake the sheets pale, barely colored, so the layers stay white against the yellow filling.
- Oven for the sheetsThe recipe gives no oven temperature and no cake formula; the sheets come from a separate snow cake recipe. Whatever formula is used, follow the author's own instruction and bake them pale: a moderate oven and a short bake, pulled when the surface springs back and before any browning sets in.
- Yield and thicknessThe filling makes something on the order of 4 to 5 cups, ample for a three- or four-layer cake. It thickens further as it cools, so stop while it is still a shade looser than you want it.
- Keeping itThis is a butter-and-egg curd with no preservative beyond sugar. Refrigerate it, and refrigerate the assembled cake; use within three or four days.
Curd fillings of this kind, sugar and citrus juice thickened with yolks and enriched with butter, were standard layer-cake furniture in American bakeries by the late nineteenth century, and coconut was a fashionable addition once shredded and desiccated coconut became cheaply available. The "Havana" of the name may well be decorative rather than geographic, though the evidence does not settle the question. What makes the entry characteristic of The American Pastry Cook is the way the instructions break off into a rambling anecdote about a burnt cake at the Shippingsport toll house near Louisville, on the Louisville and Portland Canal, before circling back to the one piece of advice that actually matters, that the white sheets be baked pale. The trade books of this era were written by working bakers for working bakers, and they often read like shop talk, including, as here, the casual racial slur that a modern reader will hit without warning and that the text is reproduced with only because it is presented unaltered.