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Cocoanut Made as Jelly Cake
Mrs. Ira Metcalf.
One cup of butter, three cups of sugar, one cup of milk, five cups of flour, six teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder, whites of eight eggs; bake in jelly cake pans; for dressing to put between, take the whites of six eggs beaten stiff, half a pound of dessicated cocoanut, and one cup of powdered sugar.
The cake batter itself is a conventional white layer cake of the period, but the filling is uncooked egg white and sugar, spread between layers and never heated at any point. That is the reason this page carries a caution.
- The filling is raw eggSix raw whites beaten with sugar and coconut are spread on cooled cake and eaten as-is. Nothing in the process brings the whites to a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and the sugar concentration in a soft uncooked meringue is nowhere near high enough to be inhibitory. Use a current recipe for a coconut filling — a cooked seven-minute icing or a pasteurised-egg preparation — rather than this one.
- It also does not setBeaten whites with no cooking, gelatin or boiled syrup will tend to collapse and weep within hours, so even setting safety aside the filling behaves poorly.
- "Cook's Friend"A Canadian brand of baking powder widely advertised in the 1870s. It was a single-acting powder, so the six teaspoons called for here are not a like-for-like match with modern double-acting baking powder in either strength or behaviour.
- "Jelly cake pans"Shallow round tins, often something in the 8-to-9-inch range and much shallower than the deep 2-inch layers a modern cake pan gives; the recipe itself specifies no size. Thin layers meant to be stacked with a filling between.
- Desiccated cocoanutThe period product was unsweetened, finely shredded and quite dry, closer to today's macaroon or fine desiccated coconut than to the moist sweetened flake sold in bags. Sweetened flake would push an already very sweet filling further.
- ScaleFive cups of flour, three of sugar and eight whites is a large formula by current standards, likely enough for four or more thin layers.
Jelly cake was the standard Victorian layer cake: thin rounds baked in shallow tins and stacked with something spreadable between them, originally fruit jelly, later whatever a cook fancied, or as here coconut. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this reads as a note passed between neighbours rather than a tested formula; Mrs. Ira Metcalf assumed her reader already knew how hot to build the fire and how long a thin layer takes. Coconut appears in Canadian and American cookbooks of the 1870s in desiccated form, shipped dried rather than in the shell, and it carried the same faint prestige of the tropics that pineapple and citrus did; the large-scale commercial trade in it, though, was a later development. The baking powder named in the recipe, Cook's Friend, was a heavily advertised Canadian brand, and its appearance by name marks the spread of chemical leavening, which here works alongside beaten egg whites rather than in place of them.