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Punch Icing
Take some very white and finely-sifted sugar, and mix it to a thick syrup with a little lemon-juice and rum. Before using it, make it hot, and put whatever is iced with it into a cool oven to dry as soon as the icing is spread upon it.
A glaze rather than a frosting: sugar loosened with lemon juice and rum, warmed, spread thin and dried in a barely warm oven. The original gives no quantities, so the working ratio is the thing to fix first.
- The sugar"Very white and finely-sifted sugar" means what is now sold as icing or confectioners' sugar, sieved to break up lumps. Modern boxed icing sugar already contains a little cornflour, which thickens the glaze slightly; sieve it anyway.
- ProportionsNone are given. A serviceable starting point is about 1 cup (4 oz) icing sugar to 1 tablespoon lemon juice and 1-2 teaspoons rum, added a few drops at a time. It should coat the back of a spoon and fall in a thick ribbon, not run off.
- "A cool oven"The book gives no figure; in period terms this is the low end of range heat, perhaps somewhere around 200-250F. The point is to drive off moisture and set the surface without colouring it; too much heat softens the glaze.
- Warm it, but gentlyHeating the icing before spreading makes it flow thinly and evenly. Do it in a bowl over hot water, not directly on the burner, and stop well short of a simmer or the sugar crystallises and goes grainy and dull.
- The rum does two jobsIt flavours, and the alcohol speeds drying. Too much and the glaze will never set firm, so add the lemon juice first for body and the rum last, by the teaspoon.
- Apply to a cool surfaceA warm cake will thin the glaze and absorb it. Let the cake go completely cold, brush off loose crumbs, then spread quickly with a palette knife or offset spatula while the icing is hot.
- YieldThe quantity above is enough for the top of a single 8-inch cake or a dozen small buns. It sets to a thin, brittle, semi-transparent shell rather than an opaque white coat.
The name points at the drink, not at any punching: punch flavouring in nineteenth-century confectionery meant the trio of rum, lemon and sugar that defined a bowl of punch, and the same combination turns up in punch sauce for puddings, punch jelly and the Austrian Punschtorte. The instruction to dry rather than bake likely reflects a period in which cooks are often said to have used the falling heat of a coal range as a drying cupboard, a use for which the modern oven's lowest setting, or simply a warm dry room and patience, stands in.