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Cocoanut Cakes
Have a wheat-cake preparation adding en plus to the batter half ounce grated cocoanut, then proceed to finish the cakes in the same manner. CANAPES DANOIS (DANISH CANAPES) Prepare six medium-sized bread canaps, rounded to two and a half inches in diameter. Toast them to a golden colour. Cover each with a very thin slice of cooked ham cut the same as the canaps. Spread a very little French mustard over the ham. Cut out six very thin slices smoked salmon, but only half the size of the ham, and arrange, on top of half the ham, spread half teaspoon Russian caviar over the other half of the ham each canap. Hash up very finely one cold, hard-boiled egg and sprinkle it over the canaps evenly. Dress on a dish with a folded napkin. Decorate with six quarters of lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already have a batch of griddle-cake batter and simply flavours it. The whole of the coconut instruction is one line, so everything depends on what you fold it into.
- "Wheat-cake preparation"This points back to a plain American griddle-cake (pancake) batter of the period: flour, milk, egg, a little sugar and salt, raised with baking powder or with soda and sour milk. The master recipe is not reproduced here, so the batch size assumed is unknown.
- How much coconut that isHalf an ounce of grated coconut is roughly 2 tablespoons of dried shredded coconut, or a slightly generous amount of fresh. It is a hint of flavour across a full batch, not a coconut cake; double or triple it if you want the coconut to read clearly.
- Cocoanut in 1900Grated coconut at this period could mean either fresh nut grated at home or packaged desiccated coconut; sweetened shredded coconut was also on the market. If you use modern sweetened flaked coconut the cakes will be noticeably sweeter and more prone to scorching on the griddle.
- Chop it fineLong modern shreds tangle in a thin batter and burn at the edges. Pulse the coconut a few times or chop it before adding so it disperses evenly.
- Griddle heatThe original gives none. Cook on a moderately hot, lightly greased griddle (medium, around 375F on a modern electric griddle, is the usual modern equivalent). Coconut is fatty and colours faster than plain batter, so watch the first cake and adjust down rather than up.
- Toasting the coconutNot in the original, but a few minutes in a dry pan until pale gold deepens the flavour considerably and costs nothing. Cool it before it goes into the batter.
- YieldDepends on the wheat-cake batter you start from, which is not given here. Serve hot with butter and syrup, as griddle cakes usually were.
Coconut reached American and European kitchens in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, first as whole nuts carried north from the Caribbean and then, from the 1890s onward, as machine-shredded desiccated coconut sold by the packet. That shift is why a book like this can treat it as a casual add-in to a breakfast batter rather than an occasion ingredient: half an ounce of grated coconut assumes a tin in the pantry. The entry also shows how period cookbooks were built, with one master preparation (here the wheat cake) followed by a string of one-line variations that spare the compositor from setting the same batter a dozen times. Griddle cakes themselves were a staple of the American breakfast table, cooked to order on a soapstone or iron griddle and sent to the table in relays.