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Cocoanut Pound Cake
Put half a pound of butter into a basin, warm and beat to a cream, mix in one pound of caster-sugar and the grated rind of one lemon, a cupful of mik and four eggs beaten separately. When these are mixed, add two teaspoonfuls of bicarbonate of soda and sufficient flour to make the mixture of the required consistence; mix in the grated white of a cocoanut, put in a sharp oven, and bake for half an hour.
A pound cake in name only — the soda and milk make it closer to a rich butter cake. The recipe leaves the flour quantity to the cook's judgment, so read it as a formula rather than a set of measurements.
- The flour is genuinely unspecified"Sufficient flour to make the mixture of the required consistence" assumes you know what a pound-cake batter should look like: thick, glossy, and just able to drop from the spoon. For half a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, four eggs and a cup of milk, that lands somewhere near 3½ to 4 cups of flour, but the coconut's moisture will shift it. Add it in stages and stop when the batter holds a soft ribbon.
- "A sharp oven" is too hot for this cakeSharp or quick ovens are generally taken to mean somewhere in the region of 400-450F, though period usage varies and no exact equivalent exists. A batter this rich and this deep will set a crust and stay raw in the middle at that heat. Bake it at 350F, and expect considerably longer than the half hour stated — 50 to 70 minutes in a tube or loaf pan, tested with a skewer.
- Two teaspoonfuls of soda is a lotBicarbonate needs acid to work, and there is none here beyond whatever the milk offers; fresh milk offers very little. The excess reads as a soapy, metallic edge and can turn the crumb yellowish. A teaspoon of soda with soured milk or buttermilk, or two teaspoons of baking powder with the sweet milk, behaves the way the recipe intends.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine or bar sugar — finer than granulated, coarser than confectioners'. Granulated will do if you cream it thoroughly with the warmed butter; the fine grain simply dissolves faster.
- Eggs "beaten separately"This means yolks and whites beaten apart, not one egg at a time. Beat the yolks into the butter and sugar, then fold the whipped whites in at the end, after the flour and coconut, or you will lose the lift they are there to provide.
- The coconut"The grated white of a cocoanut" is the meat of one fresh nut, roughly 2 to 3 cups grated, and it carries its own liquid. Packaged sweetened flake is not a substitute — it is drier and much sweeter; unsweetened desiccated coconut is closer, though you may want a little extra milk.
- "A basin" and warming the butterA basin is simply a mixing bowl. Warm means soft enough to cream — around 65–70F — not melted; melted butter will not hold air and the cake comes out dense.
- Pan and yieldNo tin is named. A buttered 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5 loaf pans suits this quantity, giving 16 to 20 slices. Cool it well before cutting; coconut cakes are fragile warm.
Coconut was still enough of a luxury note in the 1890s, when Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms, to justify putting it in a pound cake. The cake itself shows the old pound formula in transition: the name survives from the eighteenth-century rule of a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, but here the butter has been halved, milk has been added, and chemical leavening does part of the work the beaten eggs once did alone. Bicarbonate of soda in this quantity, with a British spelling and "caster-sugar" beside it, might tempt one to guess at an English source rather than a Waldorf pastry cook's own notebook, though that is only a guess — the book gathers widely and does not always say from where.