Home › Village Receipts › White Mountain Frosting
White Mountain Frosting
One cup of sugar, one-third cup of boiling water, white of one egg, vanilla. Boil sugar and water until it congeals slightly in cold water. Pour this on the beaten whites gradually, and beat until quite stiff and smooth. Flavor to taste.
— Mrs. Frank N. Rogers
This is a boiled icing — what a pastry kitchen would now call an Italian meringue. The whole recipe hinges on the sugar syrup reaching the right stage, since nothing else sets it.
- The syrup stage"Congeals slightly in cold water" is generally read as the soft-ball test: a drop of syrup forms a soft, pliable ball rather than a thread, roughly 238-240F on a thermometer. Much under-boiled and the frosting tends to stay soupy; taken much past soft ball it stiffens and can set before it is spread.
- ProportionsOne cup granulated sugar is 7 oz; one-third cup boiling water is about 80 ml. Using boiling water simply saves a minute or two of heating — cold water works the same.
- One egg white is correctIt looks scant against a cup of sugar, but the syrup does the volume work. Have the white beaten to soft peaks before the syrup is ready, not stiff — over-beaten whites break down when the hot syrup goes in.
- PouringAdd the syrup in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl, not onto the beater, which would fling it into threads against the sides. A stand mixer or hand mixer makes this straightforward; with a wire whisk it needs a second pair of hands.
- Beat until cool"Quite stiff and smooth" means the bowl has come down to about body temperature, roughly 6-8 minutes of beating. Warm frosting slumps off the sides of a cake.
- FlavoringAbout half a teaspoon of vanilla, stirred in at the end once the mixture has cooled; some of the flavour is lost if it goes in while the mixture is still hot.
- WeatherBoiled icings are humidity-sensitive. On a damp day the surface stays tacky and may weep; a dry day gives the thin crisp crust with the marshmallowy interior that is the point of the style.
- YieldEnough to frost a single 8-inch layer, or to top about a dozen cupcakes. Double it for a two-layer cake.
- Egg whiteThe hot syrup heats the white but does not reliably pasteurize it. If that matters for who is eating, use carton pasteurized whites, which whip normally here.
Boiled or "white mountain" frosting belongs to the late nineteenth-century American cake, and its rise is often linked to two ordinary developments: refined white granulated sugar becoming cheap and consistent, and the geared rotary egg beater becoming a standard kitchen fixture — though the connection is plausible inference rather than documented fact. Beating a single egg white stiff while pouring in hot syrup is thankless work with a fork, and while boiled icings appear in American cookery print earlier, the technique becomes common in community cookbooks from the 1880s onward. The name is generally traced to the snow-capped look of the peaked, swirled surface — often linked to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, though the association is traditional rather than documented, and older books use "boiled icing" for the same thing. Its appearance here among the village receipts, credited to a named contributor, is typical of the genre: a compact, reliable formula that a subscriber could vouch for by her own kitchen, set down in the shorthand of a cook who assumed the reader already knew what soft-ball sugar looked like.