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Cocoanut Cake (III)
Mrs. Ira Metcalf.
One cup of butter, three cups of sugar, one cup of milk, three eggs, four teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder, one large cocoanut grated.
A community-cookbook contribution of the barest kind: a list of proportions handed between cooks who already knew what to do with them. Two things need saying before anything else, and one of them is that the flour is missing.
- There is no flour in the listThis is not a flourless cake; the ingredient was simply left out, as often happened when receipts were copied from memory or from a card that assumed it. A batter of this scale — one cup butter, three cups sugar, one cup milk, three eggs — takes roughly four to five cups of flour to come together as a cake. That is an inference from comparable cakes of the period, not a figure the book supplies, so treat the whole thing as a starting point rather than a working formula.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA commercial brand long sold in Canada, and in this book simply the household name for baking powder. Four teaspoons is a great deal by modern standards, but the batter is large and carries only three eggs. Nineteenth-century powders varied in strength and are hard to compare directly with a modern double-acting one, so the quantity is worth reducing and testing rather than followed as written.
- One large cocoanut, gratedA whole fresh coconut, cracked, the brown skin pared from the meat, and the meat grated on a box grater — about three to four cups, moist and only lightly sweet. Packaged sweetened shredded coconut is a different ingredient: drier, much sweeter, and coarser. If substituting, use unsweetened flakes and cut the sugar.
- No method at allThe period assumption is the creaming method: butter and sugar beaten pale, eggs added, then flour and milk alternately, baking powder sifted with the flour, coconut folded in last so it does not tear the batter.
- OvenThe receipt gives no oven direction at all. A cake this rich would bake well at a modern 350F, but that figure is a suggestion, not a conversion of anything in the text. In a Victorian kitchen the heat came from a wood or coal range judged by hand, which is one reason so many of these receipts give no temperature.
- Pan and yieldThe quantities make a very large cake — enough for two 9-inch layer tins with coconut between them, or a single deep tin baked closer to an hour. Expect twelve to sixteen servings.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally regarded as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind — a genre borrowed from American charity cookery books of the Civil War years. Its structure explains the shape of this receipt: contributions were signed, gathered quickly, and printed largely as received, which is why Mrs. Ira Metcalf's cake arrives as a set of proportions with the flour and the method both left to the reader's competence. The coconut is worth noting. Whole coconuts were reaching North American markets in growing quantities through the later nineteenth century, and grated-coconut cakes appear with increasing frequency in cookbooks of the period — though how far this one ingredient tracks a shift from regional specialty to general show-off cake is more than the evidence here will bear.