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Cocoanut Cake (V)
Mrs. H. Baird.
Three eggs, one cup of sugar, one cup of milk, two cups and one-half of flour, one tablespoon of butter, one teaspoon of soda, two teaspoons of cream of tartar. Beat with a fork. Add milk and whites of the eggs together; only half of the whites; keep the rest for icing with cocoanut.
A plain butter-poor cup cake leavened with soda and cream of tartar, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed the reader had made a dozen like it. The gaps are in method and baking, not in the proportions.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder; the pair reacts as soon as it is wet, so the batter goes into the pan and into the oven immediately. Commercial powder can stand in for both, though the usual equivalence works out nearer four teaspoons than two and a half.
- Sift the acid and soda into the flourBoth are dry powders and must be distributed through the 2 1/2 cups of flour before the milk goes in, or you get bitter streaks. This is the step the original leaves entirely unsaid.
- The one tablespoon of butterThat is not a typo for a half cup. This is a lean, almost sponge-like cake in the nineteenth-century "cup cake" mould, and it will be drier and firmer than a modern layer cake. Cream the butter with the sugar, then beat in the yolks.
- Half the whitesThree whites, half reserved. Beat the working half to soft peaks and fold them in with the milk at the end, as directed; the remaining one and a half whites go to the icing.
- Pan and ovenThe batter fills two 8-inch layer pans or one 9-inch square. Bake at 350F, 20 to 25 minutes for layers, 30 to 35 for the single pan, until a skewer comes out clean.
- The icing is not given"Icing with cocoanut" meant a boiled icing (sugar syrup at about 240F poured over the beaten whites) or a plain uncooked white icing beaten with sifted sugar. Uncooked egg-white icing is now generally made with pasteurized whites; a boiled icing cooks the whites as it is made and is the safer of the two.
- CocoanutAt this date it would usually have meant a fresh nut grated at home, moist and coarse and only faintly sweet. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the nearest thing; sweetened flake will make the finished cake noticeably sugary.
- YieldA two-layer 8-inch cake, ten to twelve slices.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877, itself modelled on the Chicago volume of 1874) was compiled from the contributed receipts of local women, which is why several cocoanut cakes stand under different names, each with its donor attached. Coconut was a fashionable ingredient in exactly this period. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing dates the recipe as much as the coconut does; reliable canned baking powder existed by the 1870s, yet the two powders were still being combined by hand in recipes like this one.