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Coconut Filling
½ cup milk
4 tablespoons confectioners'
1½ cups shredded coconut sugar
2 egg-whites
Warm the milk, pour it over the coconut and soak until well softened, usually one-half hour. Beat the egg-whites stiff and add the sugar gradually. Spread a thin coating of the egg and sugar mixture on the layer, then spread a covering of the moistened coconut. To what is left of the filling, add enough confectioners' sugar to thicken, stir in the remaining coconut and spread the mixture thickly over the top. Sprinkle the whole cake with dry coconut.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the two-column typesetting of the original page; read it as ½ cup milk, 1½ cups shredded coconut, 2 egg whites, and 4 tablespoons confectioners' sugar. The method itself is the problem.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites are beaten with sugar and spread straight onto a finished cake. Nothing in the procedure brings them to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and unlike a boiled or Italian meringue there is no hot syrup poured in. A cake sitting out for a day only extends the exposure.
- Milk that is warmed and then left standingThe milk is warmed, but only enough to soften the coconut, not to a temperature that would make it safe; it is then held at room temperature for half an hour and spread onto the cake. Combined with the uncooked whites, the finished filling is a cool, moist, protein-rich layer with no acid and no preservative.
- Use a current recipeIf you want a coconut layer cake, work from a modern seven-minute frosting or a cooked coconut custard filling, where the eggs and milk are taken to temperature as part of the method.
- On the coconut itself"Shredded coconut" in this period generally meant unsweetened desiccated coconut, drier than the sweetened flaked coconut sold in bags today, which is likely why the recipe soaks it in milk at all.
The Butterick Publishing Company built its business on dress patterns and its magazines on the household knowledge that went with them, so its recipe collections read as a survey of what an ordinary American kitchen was doing around the turn of the twentieth century. Coconut belongs to that moment: dried, shredded coconut became a cheap grocery staple in the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, once shipping and commercial desiccating put it within reach of cooks who would never see a whole nut. Coconut layer cake, coconut pie and coconut drops appear in American cookbooks in quantity from the 1880s onward, and uncooked white-of-egg beaten with confectioners' sugar was one common way to bind the shreds to a cake.