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Boiled Frosting
4 Tablespoon' als Boiling Water 1 Tablespo nful Snowdrift 1/2 Teaspoo ful Desired Flavoring Combine the sugar, water, Snowdrift and cream of tartar and boil the mixture, without stirring, until it threads. Add the flavoring, cool until tepid, then beat until it is thick enough to spread on the cake. ⅛ Teaspoonful Cream of Tartar
The page has come through the scanner badly: the sugar quantity is gone, the fractions are broken, and the cream of tartar has drifted to the bottom of the entry. What survives is a standard boiled sugar icing of the period, cut with a spoonful of shortening in place of the more usual egg white.
- The missing sugarNo quantity for sugar appears anywhere in the surviving text. Boiled frostings of this era were generally built on a cup or so of granulated sugar to a few tablespoons of water, but the original figure here is lost and should not be guessed at from the ratio alone.
- Reading the garbled lines"4 Tablespoon' als Boiling Water" is four tablespoonfuls, "1 Tablespo nful Snowdrift" is one tablespoonful, and "18 Teaspoonful Cream of Tartar" is almost certainly 1/8 teaspoonful. The flavoring is half a teaspoonful.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening, later sold under the Wesson Oil & Snowdrift name; the brand's appearance in the ingredient list suggests promotional origin. Any solid vegetable shortening stands in; butter will work but changes the set and the flavor.
- "Until it threads"The thread stage falls somewhere around 223-235F on a candy thermometer, when a spoonful dropped from the spoon trails a fine thread. This is the hinge of the recipe: under it the frosting never firms, over it it turns grainy and sets before it can be spread.
- Why you must not stirStirring a boiling sugar syrup drags undissolved crystals back into the mixture and seeds it, giving a sandy frosting. The cream of tartar is there for the same reason, inverting part of the sugar so it resists crystallizing.
- Cooling before beating"Tepid" means genuinely lukewarm, around 110F. Beating a hot syrup produces a coarse grain; beating a cold one gives a stiff mass that tears the cake.
- Working timeOnce it thickens under the beater it sets quickly. Have the cake ready and spread at once; a teaspoon of hot water beaten in will loosen it if it stiffens too far.
- YieldCannot be fixed without the missing sugar quantity; a boiled frosting on about a cup of sugar would cover the top and sides of a single 8- or 9-inch layer cake.
Boiled frosting, also called boiled icing, was the standard American cake covering before confectioners' sugar became cheap and ubiquitous in home kitchens. It depends on nothing but sugar cookery: a syrup taken to the thread stage and beaten as it cools, so the crystals that form are too small to feel on the tongue. Snowdrift was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening marketed from around 1900 by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and cookbooks like this one were promotional literature, issued by the manufacturer to teach cooks to reach for the can in places where butter or lard had always gone. The spoonful of shortening here does little for flavor; its job is to keep the frosting soft and to put the brand name in the ingredient list.