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Cocoanut Cake
M. R. Beard.
One cup of butter, three of sugar, one of milk, four of flour or one pint, one teaspoonful of soda, two of cream of tartar, five eggs ; bake in layers like jelly cake. Icing to place between the layers : Half a pound of white sugar to the whites of two eggs, whip the eggs and add the grated cocoanut in, and place between the layer.
The cake batter is a conventional nineteenth-century cup cake, but the filling is uncooked egg white beaten with sugar and coconut, spread between layers and never heated. That is the part that fails today.
- Why the cautionThe icing is raw egg white, whipped with sugar and coconut and left uncooked between the layers. Nothing in the method brings it near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the filling then sits at room temperature inside a moist cake for hours. Use a current recipe for any filling or frosting rather than this one.
- The sugar is not a safeguardHalf a pound of sugar to two whites is well short of the sugar in a stiff, dried royal icing, and a soft uncooked icing of this kind should not be relied on to preserve anything.
- Cup sizesA cup in this period is usually taken as the half-pint, 8 fl oz, though the recipe's own gloss of four cups of flour as 'one pint' does not square with that and may refer to weight rather than volume. Flour was measured by scooping, so modern all-purpose flour can pack heavier for the same volume.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon of soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, a common leavening at the time alongside commercial tins. It begins acting as soon as it is wetted, so a batter mixed this way was best got into the pans and the oven promptly.
- CocoanutGrated coconut here most likely means fresh nut, cracked and grated at home, though dried shredded coconut was also becoming available. Fresh coconut is wetter and more perishable than the sweetened packaged shred sold now.
- ScaleFive eggs, three cups of sugar and a pint of flour makes a large cake. The recipe does not say how many layers it should make or what size tins to use.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the early wave of American charity cookbooks, compiled from contributions by named local women and sold to support a benevolent institution, which is why so many receipts here carry initials and a surname rather than a title. Coconut cake was a display dish in that world: the nut had to be cracked, pared and grated by hand, and its whiteness against white icing signalled expense and effort in a way a spice cake never could. The separate measuring of soda and cream of tartar is of its moment too, at a time when the purity of commercial baking powders was a live public complaint. The instruction to bake it "in layers like jelly cake" assumes the reader already owns a set of shallow tins.