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Mountain Cocoanut Cake
Take one cup of butter; two cups of sugar; four cups of flour; one-half cup of milk; whites of fourteen eggs; two teaspoons of baking powder. Mix in the usual way and bake in layers. Grate three cocoanuts. Make the icing out of the whites of three eggs, well beaten, two cups of sugar, and the meat and milk of two of the cocoanuts. After the layers of cake have been put together, sift all over the cake the grated meat of the other cocoanut. This cake should be eaten the same day it is made, as, in warm weather, the milk from the cocoanuts will sour.
A four-layer white cake from the era when a whole coconut was a luxury worth building a cake around. The layers themselves are conventional; the icing is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe icing is three raw egg whites beaten with sugar and fresh coconut water, spread on cooled cake and never cooked. Raw egg white carries a salmonella risk, and the recipe's own warning that the coconut milk will sour points to an unrefrigerated dessert held at room temperature for hours. Use a current recipe for a cooked or meringue-based icing instead.
- "Coconut milk" means the waterIn 1911 the milk of a coconut is the thin liquid sloshing inside the shell, not the pressed cream sold in cans today. It is watery, faintly sweet and spoils quickly, which is exactly why the cake was a same-day affair.
- Three coconutsA medium coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of grated meat, so this calls for close to 10 cups. Cracking and grating three of them by hand is the real labor of the recipe; the baking is straightforward by comparison.
- Fourteen egg whitesAbout 1 3/4 cups, taking a large white at roughly 30 g. Period eggs were not sold in graded sizes, so measure by volume rather than counting shells.
- "Mix in the usual way"Cream the butter and sugar, add flour and milk alternately, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. The whites are the only leavening beyond the baking powder, so folding rather than stirring is the point.
- FlourFour cups. The recipe says only 'flour'; a softer, lower-protein flour than modern all-purpose is the likely match, so cake flour will give a closer crumb, and measure by weight if you can.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven temperature or baking time. Layers of this size are usually baked around 350F for roughly 20 to 25 minutes.
- YieldA tall layer cake serving 12 to 16. The quantities are for a large household or a party table, not a weeknight.
Coconut cake became a Southern and Eastern-seaboard showpiece in the decades after whole coconuts began arriving in quantity from the Caribbean by steamer, cheap enough for a cook to buy three at once and still expensive enough to make the cake an occasion. "Mountain cake" is a name found in period cookery, often said to be used of very tall, many-layered white cakes, the height being the whole point of the name. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, put out its cook book as part of a broader line of household guides aimed at the same middle-class readers, and its cake chapter reflects a moment when chemical baking powder had made high, fine-grained layer cakes routine while refrigeration had not yet arrived to keep them. The closing instruction to eat the cake the day it is made is the honest sound of a kitchen with an icebox at best.