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For Filling (Teaspoonful vanilla extract)
/ 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 white of egg 1 cupful water ½ cupful chopped cocoanut 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful Crisco 1 cupful sugar Pinch cream of tartar For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together, sift the flour, baking powder, and salt, and add alternately with the beaten yolks of eggs and milk. Beat thoroughly, then add stiffly beaten whites of eggs and flavoring and mix gently. Grease layer tins with Crisco then flour them and divide mixture into three portions. Bake in a moderate oven twenty minutes. For filling. Boil water and sugar together, add Crisco and cream of tartar, and boil until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240° F. Beat white of egg to stiff froth, add salt, then pour in syrup gradually, add vanilla and beat until thick and cold. Spread on cake and sprinkle over with cocoanut.
Sufficient for three layers.
This is the filling half of a three-layer coconut cake, and the ingredient list printed here covers only the icing — the cake's flour, butter-substitute, sugar, eggs, milk and baking powder are assumed from the facing page. Treat the method as two separate operations and read the sugar syrup instructions first.
- The ingredient list is incompleteEverything listed belongs to the filling. The cake directions call for Crisco, sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, egg yolks, milk, beaten whites and flavoring in quantities that do not appear. Use a standard 1-2-3-4 or hot-milk layer cake formula for three layer tins.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, and the whole point of the book. Modern Crisco was reformulated to bring trans fats below half a gram a serving; it still creams and greases much as the original did. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter will change the crumb and colour.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Thin layers in three tins will be done at twenty minutes; test at eighteen.
- The hinge: 240FThe syrup must reach the soft-ball stage and no further. Below it the icing never sets and slides off the layers; carried past the soft-ball range it sets hard and is liable to turn grainy as it beats. Use a thermometer rather than the cold-water test if you have one.
- Pouring the syrupAdd it in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl onto the beating whites, not into the beaters, or it will spin into hard threads. Keep beating until the bowl is cool to the hand — usually seven to ten minutes with a stand mixer — or the icing will weep.
- CocoanutIn 1913 this would most often have been dried, finely shredded coconut, drier and less sweet than the sweetened flaked coconut sold now, though fresh coconut chopped at home was still used. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is the closer match; sweetened flake will make an already sweet icing sweeter.
- Cream of tartarAn acid that inverts a little of the sugar as it boils, which is what keeps the finished icing smooth instead of crystalline. Do not leave it out.
- YieldEnough filling and topping for three layers. The recipe has you beat the icing until thick and cold before spreading.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a shelf-stable white vegetable shortening made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911. The book's strategy is visible in this recipe, where Crisco appears not only in the cake and on the greased tins but as a teaspoonful stirred into a boiled sugar icing — a demonstration that the new product could go anywhere lard or butter went. Boiled icing itself was long established by then, a standard finish for layer cakes in the decades before butter creams and cream cheese frostings took over, and coconut sprinkled over white icing was a conventional dress for a company cake. Shredded coconut had become widely available in American groceries in the later nineteenth century, which is why it turns up so freely in cake books of this period.