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Boiled Frosting for Chocolate Cake
One cup of sugar, one-third cup water; boil till it drops from spoon in strings, take off stove and add the white of one egg well beaten, beat all together and add a little vanilla.
— Mrs. William Webster
A one-egg boiled frosting of the plainest sort: sugar syrup beaten into egg white. It works, but the order of operations in the original is the reverse of modern practice and the doneness cue is the whole recipe.
- Read the syrup with a thermometer"Drops from spoon in strings" is the thread stage, roughly 230-235F. Taken a little further, to 238-240F (soft ball), the frosting sets firmer and holds its shape on a cake; under 230F it stays soupy and will slide off the sides.
- Reverse the pouringRather than dumping the beaten white into the pan, beat the whites to soft peaks and pour the hot syrup into them in a thin steady stream with the mixer running. This keeps the white from scrambling in one hot mass and gives a glossy meringue.
- Keep beating until coolThe frosting is done when the bowl is no longer warm to the hand and the meringue holds a firm peak — five to eight minutes with a stand mixer, considerably longer by hand. Stopping while warm means it will weep as it sits.
- Do not stir the syrupOnce the sugar has dissolved, leave the pan alone and wash any crystals off the sides with a wet brush. Stirring or stray grains will seed the syrup and give a gritty rather than satiny frosting.
- QuantityOne cup of sugar and one white makes roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of beaten frosting — about enough to cover the top and sides of a single 8- or 9-inch layer thinly, or the top of a small loaf generously. Double it for a two-layer cake.
- Vanilla"A little" means about half a teaspoon. Add it at the end, off the heat, once the mixture has cooled somewhat, so the alcohol does not simply evaporate.
- Weather mattersBoiled frostings are humidity-sensitive and will stay tacky or turn sticky on a damp day. Use the cake the day it is frosted; the surface crusts and the interior dries out by the second day.
- Egg whiteThe hot syrup brings the white well up in temperature but does not reliably pasteurize it. Anyone cooking for the very young, the elderly or the immunocompromised should use pasteurized whites.
Boiled frosting — also called American frosting, and closely related to the seven-minute frosting made over a double boiler — became a household standard once refined white sugar was cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the thrifty cook's meringue: no butter, no cream, no chocolate in the frosting itself, just sugar, water and a single egg white, which is why it turns up in community collections like this one alongside cakes rich enough to need a plain white coat. The pairing with chocolate cake is not incidental; the stark white cap over a dark crumb was often admired in the period, and devil's food cake, which spread through American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, was frequently said to be finished this way.