Home › Cake Fillings and Frostings › Cocoanut Filling
Cocoanut Filling
Take one and one-half cups of cocoanut; whites of two eggs; four tablespoons of powdered sugar; a little milk. Moisten the cocoanut with a little warm milk, and let it soak until well softened usually one-half hour. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and add the sugar to them. Spread on the bottom cake a thin layer of the frosting of egg and sugar, and then a covering of the soaked cocoanut, and repeat this operation until all the layers are arranged. To what is left of the frosting, add enough sugar to thicken, stir in the remnant of cocoanut, and spread the mixture thickly over the top, sprinkling dry cocoanut over the whole.
A layer-cake filling of the simplest kind: raw meringue and softened coconut, built up wet between the layers. The method is clear enough, but the frosting is never cooked, and that is the problem.
- Why it fails todayThe egg whites are beaten with sugar and spread straight onto the cake without heat at any stage. Uncooked whites carry a real risk of Salmonella, and the moist, sugary, room-temperature filling sits between layers for hours before it is eaten. A current recipe using cooked or pasteurized whites should be used instead.
- The soaked coconut compounds itThe soaked coconut -- Warm milk is poured over the coconut and left about half an hour before use. That is a short window, and on its own it is not the main issue; the uncooked white is. But the finished filling is moist, sugary and held at room temperature on a cake stand, and no adjustment of quantities makes an uncooked white safe.
- What "cocoanut" meantThe recipe does not specify, but in this period it would ordinarily mean unsweetened desiccated or freshly grated coconut rather than the sweetened flaked coconut sold in bags now. Four tablespoons of sugar suggests the coconut was expected to bring none of its own; sweetened coconut would likely make the result cloying.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugar"Powdered sugar" is not quite confectioners' sugar -- In this period powdered sugar generally meant granulated sugar ground fine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which can affect a meringue's gloss and body.
- Quantities are loose by design"A little milk" and "enough sugar to thicken" carry no measure, and none can be honestly supplied. The writer expected the cook to judge by eye: coconut just damp, not swimming; frosting stiff enough to hold a peak.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many layers or what size cake. One and a half cups of coconut and two whites would go thinly, probably suiting a two- or three-layer cake of moderate size with a skim over the top; this is a filling stretched thin, not a thick buttercream.
Coconut fillings and frostings appear in nearly every American cake chapter of the late nineteenth century, and their spread is generally traced to the arrival of cheap desiccated coconut in grocery stores from the 1880s and 1890s onward. Before that, a cook wanting coconut cake had to buy a whole nut, crack it, drain the water and grate the meat by hand — a job several older cookbooks describe at length. Packaged shredded coconut turned an occasional showpiece into a weeknight layer cake, and household cookbooks aimed at a broad middle-class readership reflect that shift. The uncooked egg-white frosting here is equally of its period: boiled icings and meringues cooked over hot water existed, but plain beaten white and sugar was faster and needed no thermometer.