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Splendid Confectioner's Frosting
Take two large tablespoons of new milk and stir in enough XXX sugar to make it the right consistency to spread on the cake. In using this XXX sugar, no eggs are required, and the frosting will dry in five or ten minutes.
A two-ingredient glace icing whose only real variable is the sugar-to-milk ratio. The period detail worth knowing is what "XXX" meant on a sugar barrel.
- XXX sugarA 19th-century grading for finely milled powdered sugar; modern confectioners' sugar (usually sold as 10X, a finer grind) is the direct descendant. Today's product also contains 2-3 percent cornstarch as an anti-caking agent, which thickens the icing slightly, so you may need marginally less than the old recipe implies.
- ProportionsTwo tablespoons of milk will take somewhere on the order of a cup to a cup and a half of sifted confectioners' sugar before it reaches spreading consistency, though the recipe leaves the amount entirely to the eye. Add the sugar in stages rather than all at once; the mixture stiffens quickly toward the end.
- New milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and soured or separated. Whole milk gives the best body; cream makes a richer, slower-drying icing.
- Sift firstConfectioners' sugar compacts in the bag and the lumps will not dissolve in this little liquid. Sift or whisk it before stirring in, or the frosting will spread with visible grit.
- Why no eggsThe alternative frostings of the period were beaten egg white with sugar, or a boiled sugar syrup poured into egg whites. This one skips both, which is the whole point of the note in the original.
- DryingFive to ten minutes gives a surface crust, not a set icing. Allow an hour before stacking layers or covering the cake, or the crust will lift off in sheets.
- YieldAs written this makes enough to cover a single 8- or 9-inch cake; how far it goes depends on how much sugar you have taken up, since the recipe fixes only the milk.
- KeepingThe milk makes this a perishable icing in a way that a water-and-sugar glaze is not. A frosted cake is fine at room temperature for a day; beyond that, refrigerate it.
The X grading system for sugar was a trade convention rather than a legal standard: more Xs meant a finer grind, running from XX through XXXX and beyond, and the marking survives today in the 10X on bags of confectioners' sugar. Before mechanical pulverising made such sugar cheap and reliably available, home cooks pounded and sifted loaf sugar themselves, and an icing without egg white to bind and whiten it would have been coarse and dull. The confident tone of this entry -- "no eggs are required" -- is the sound of a cook meeting a new convenience product, in a period when frosting a cake otherwise meant either long beating of egg whites by hand or boiling sugar syrup to the correct thread.