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Cocoanut Cake (Augusta Simmers One cup)
Augusta Simmers, One cup of butter, three eggs, one of milk, four and one-half cups of flour, four teaspoonsful Cook's Friend, two teacups of dessicated cocoanut.
This is a contributor's ingredient list rather than a method, in the shorthand style of the 1870s club cookbook: the reader was assumed to know how to cream, fold and bake a plain cake. A few things need translating, and one thing is missing outright.
- There is no sugar in the listA butter cake with three eggs and four and a half cups of flour cannot work without it, and the omission is almost certainly a printer's or contributor's slip. A cake of this size would normally take two cups of sugar creamed with the butter; treat that as a reconstruction, not as what the book says.
- Cook's FriendA commercial baking powder sold in Canada in this period and named in cookbooks of the region. Substitute modern double-acting baking powder measure for measure; four teaspoons for four and a half cups of flour is on the light side by current practice, which tends to about a teaspoon per cup.
- Cup versus teacupThe recipe uses both terms, and in this period they were not necessarily the same measure, though usage was inconsistent from book to book. A "cup" is usually taken as roughly the modern 8 oz measure and a teacup as somewhat smaller, which would put the two teacups of coconut at something under two modern cups.
- Desiccated cocoanutUnsweetened dried shredded coconut, then a fairly new commercial product. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is a different ingredient and will make the cake cloying; buy unsweetened desiccated or fine shred.
- Method the recipe assumesCream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk and the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately, and fold the coconut in last so it does not sink.
- Oven and tinThe recipe gives no oven direction; for a cake of this type around 350F is the modern equivalent. This quantity fills two 9-inch layer tins (about 30 minutes) or a large tube or loaf tin (50 to 60 minutes); test with a skewer rather than by time.
- YieldRoughly a 10 to 12 portion cake. Coconut cakes of the period were often finished with a boiled white icing and more coconut scattered over while the icing was still wet, though this recipe says nothing about icing.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold to benefit the Hospital for Sick Children; it is generally regarded as the first Canadian fundraising community cookbook, and it follows the American model of printing each contributor's name above her receipt. That is why this page reads as a list rather than a method: Augusta Simmers submitted proportions, and the book's readers supplied the technique. Desiccated coconut is the telling ingredient. Shredded dried coconut is often said to have become more widely available in North American groceries around this period, and coconut cake appears with some frequency in cookbooks of this kind, though how readily households could obtain it, and what they made of it, is not documented here. The chemical leavening is the other marker of the decade: named brands like Cook's Friend appear to have been displacing the older saleratus-and-sour-milk system, and contributors wrote the brand into their recipes much as one might now write a specific brand of chocolate.