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Icing for This Cake
One pound of granulated sugar, wet with half a cup of cold water, in which you have dissolved a dessert spoon of corn starch; the whites of three eggs, beaten to a stiff froth, one-half a cake of grated chocolate, one cup of cocoanut; put all in a farina kettle, and cook until thick, then put between and on the cakes; after they are iced, sprinkle cocoanut over the frosting.
A cooked meringue frosting, stiffened with cornstarch and enriched with chocolate and coconut. It is stirred over hot water rather than boiled to a syrup stage, so the hinge is patience.
- Farina kettleA double boiler — the outer pan holds simmering water, the inner one the frosting. Direct heat will scramble the whites and scorch the chocolate; keep the water below a hard boil and stir constantly.
- Dessert spoonGenerally reckoned at two teaspoons in period American measure. Dissolve the cornstarch in the cold water before anything else goes in, or it will lump.
- One pound of sugarAbout 2 1/4 cups granulated. This is a very sweet frosting by modern taste; it is meant to set firm enough to hold layers together.
- Half a cake of grated chocolateGenuinely ambiguous. Baking chocolate was sold in blocks of varying size in this period, so "half a cake" could mean anywhere from about 1 to 4 ounces. Start with 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, finely grated, and judge by color and thickness.
- CocoanutShredded coconut, unsweetened. Commercial shredded coconut of the era was drier than today's moist bagged product; if using sweetened flaked coconut, expect a sweeter, softer result.
- Cooking until thickAllow a good spell of steady stirring; the recipe gives no time. The frosting is done when it mounds on the spoon and holds a trailing ribbon; pulled too soon it slides off the cake, cooked too long it turns grainy and refuses to spread.
- Working quicklySpread it warm. This kind of frosting crusts as it cools, so fill and coat the layers immediately, then scatter the additional coconut over the top before the surface sets or it will not stick.
- YieldEnough to fill and cover a two- or three-layer cake of 8 or 9 inches.
Cooked white frostings like this one belong to the later nineteenth century, when reliable granulated sugar and plentiful eggs made a glossy boiled icing a domestic rather than a confectioner's undertaking. The cornstarch acts as insurance: it stabilizes the whites and helps the icing set without the cook having to read a sugar syrup by eye. Coconut is something of a period marker — packaged shredded coconut was being sold in American groceries from the 1880s onward and was treated as a small luxury, which may be why it appears twice here, once stirred in and once scattered over the top. The title, "Icing for This Cake," indicates only that the icing was printed directly beneath the cake it belonged to and so needed no further name.