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Cocoanut Cake (IV)
Mrs. Rogers.
One cup of butter, two cups of white sugar, one cup of milk, three coffee-cups of flour, whites of six eggs, well beaten, three teaspoons Cook's Friend baking powder, one cocoanut grated; do not use the milk of nut.
A plain butter cake with coconut worked through the batter, written for a cook who already knew the method. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the measurements need translating before you start.
- The coffee-cup problemThe recipe uses two vessels: "cups" for the sugar, butter and milk, and "coffee-cups" for the flour. A period coffee-cup is often reckoned slightly larger than a teacup, though usage varied from book to book, so the flour is probably somewhere between 3 and 4 modern cups. Start with 3 1/2 cups (about 440 g) and judge by the batter, which should be thick but droppable.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA baking powder brand sold in Canada in this period. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder is a reasonable substitution for this quantity of flour, and no soda is needed since there is no acid ingredient.
- The coconutOne grated fresh coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of loose shreds, or about 250-300 g. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is a fair stand-in; sweetened bagged flake will push an already sweet cake over the edge.
- Why not the nut milkThe recipe is explicit that the coconut water is to be discarded, without saying why. It is thin, mildly acidic and sours quickly, and the extra liquid on top of a full cup of milk would likely be more than this batter wants.
- Method the recipe assumesCream butter and sugar, add milk and flour alternately with the baking powder sifted in, stir in the coconut, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Fold rather than beat, or you lose the lift the six whites are providing.
- Oven and pansBake at 350F. The batter fills two 9-inch layers (30-35 minutes) or one large tube pan (about an hour). Test with a skewer in the centre.
- Leftover yolksSix of them. They keep two days covered in the refrigerator and are the natural start of a boiled custard or a lemon filling between the layers.
- YieldA generous cake, 12 to 16 servings. It is dry by the third day; an icing would slow that considerably.
The Home Cook Book was published in Toronto in 1877, compiled "by ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children. It is one of the earliest Canadian fundraising cookbooks, and its structure shows it: recipes arrive signed, as this one does by Mrs. Rogers, and the same dish appears four or five times over because four or five contributors sent in their own version. That is why this is Cocoanut Cake (IV). The coconut itself marks the period as much as the signature does. By the 1870s whole nuts are generally said to have come north through the same steamship and rail networks that carried tropical fruit, cheaply enough for a household cake but still novel enough to be worth naming in the title, and the cook was expected to crack, pare and grate the thing herself. Packaged desiccated coconut and reliable branded baking powders both spread through the following decades, which is roughly when recipes like this seem to have stopped bothering to specify either.