Padgett Sunday Supper Club

The original recipe, as many recipes of the era do, requires a lot of interpretation. The original read:

Grate the nut (scraping off the rind) very find, and add half its weight in finely pounded white sugar; mix them well together with white of egg, and drop on wafer paper in small rough knobs about the size of a walnut, and bake in a slack oven. Excellent for dessert.

While finding fresh coconuts is not particularly difficult nowadays, I chose to use the packaged, dried coconut I already had in my pantry. I added a touch of coconut oil to give it some of its moisture back; any neutral oil should do. Very likely, water or coconut milk would make it more like freshly-grated coconut.

For that matter, I’ll bet lime juice would be amazing.

I decided that “finely pounded white sugar” meant something on the order of powdered sugar; that may not be true. It might mean what we today call normal sugar. I’ve seen the phrase “finely-pounded white sugar” used for making icing, which indicates powdered, but I’ve also seen it in contexts that might make more sense as normal modern sugar.

Finally, the egg white could have been meant to just hold the coconut and sugar together, but I chose to beat it first. Beaten egg whites were commonly used in baking for leavening. That said, while this is described as a “cake”, this particular book seems to use “cake” not just for what we would call cakes but also for what we would call cookies.