Home › Cake Fillings And Frostings › Cocoanut Filling
Cocoanut Filling
Whites 2 eggs.
Fresh grated cocoanut Powdered sugar Beat whites of eggs on a platter with a fork until stiff. Add enough powdered sugar to spread. Spread over cake, sprinkle thickly with cocoanut. Use for layer cake, having filling between and on top.
This is an uncooked meringue-style icing: raw egg whites beaten with powdered sugar, spread on cooled cake and never heated. That is the problem with it, and the rest of the notes are there to explain what the original text assumes.
- Raw egg white is the failure pointNothing in this method brings the whites above room temperature. The icing is spread on a cooled cake and eaten as is, so any Salmonella present in or on the shell egg survives intact. Sugar alone does not sterilise it, and the sugar concentration in a spreadable icing is far too low to be preservative.
- Who is most at riskLayer cake is a shared, sliced food that often sits out for hours at room temperature, and it is typically served to a whole household. Children, older adults, pregnant people and anyone immunocompromised are the ones for whom an uncooked-egg icing carries real consequence.
- If you want this cakeUse a current recipe for a cooked or boiled frosting, where the whites are heated over water or a hot sugar syrup is beaten in, and then finish it with coconut in the same way. The historical text should be read rather than followed.
- "Cocoanut" means the fresh nutThe instruction is 'fresh grated cocoanut', i.e. a whole brown coconut, cracked, drained, prised from the shell, the brown skin pared off and the meat grated by hand. Bagged sweetened flake is a much wetter, much sweeter product and is not what this direction describes.
- Powdered sugar of the periodNineteenth-century "powdered" sugar was sugar broken down and ground from loaf or lump sugar, finer than granulated but coarser than today's confectioners' sugar, and without added starch. Modern confectioners' sugar contains a small proportion of starch, usually around 3 percent, which may stiffen the icing faster and give a slightly chalkier set.
- Beating on a platterBeating whites on a flat platter with a fork or broad knife is a documented older technique: a shallow surface lets a small quantity of white be brought to stiffness quickly by hand. Wire whisks and rotary beaters were available by this date, so the platter method here is one option among several rather than the only one.
- No quantities givenNone are given because the ratio is judged by feel: sugar is added until the mixture will hold a spread rather than run.
Uncooked white-of-egg icing thickened with sugar was one of a small family of standard fillings and frostings in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, alongside confectioners' frosting and boiled frosting. Coconut became an increasingly ordinary American pantry item over the second half of the century, as shipping improved and commercially desiccated, packaged coconut came on the market in the later decades; the instruction to grate it fresh points to a cook still buying the whole nut. That the raw-egg icing appears without comment reflects a period before the bacteriological risk of a raw white was understood or discussed. Layer cake, spread and stacked rather than baked as a single loaf, had become a widespread fashion by this date, helped by chemical leavening and more controllable ranges.