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Filling (Boil cup water and cup sugar)
Boil ½ cup water and 1 cup sugar together, adding while boiling ¼ teaspoon cream of tartar until you can blow the syrup in feathers from a fork. Do not stir while boiling. Have ready the wellbeaten whites of 2 eggs. Pour the liquid over this and beat until almost cool. Then add 4 tablespoons grated unsweetened chocolate and beat until cold. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla and spread between the layers and over the cake, alternating the light and dark layers.
This is a boiled icing — an Italian meringue cooked with hot syrup — split into a plain and a chocolate portion. The syrup stage is the whole recipe; everything else follows from it.
- The feather stageSyrup "blown in feathers from a fork" is generally placed at roughly 232-240F, in or just above the soft-ball range; sources differ on the exact figure. Dip a fork, blow through the tines: at temperature the film flies off in threads rather than dropping in beads.
- Do not stir, and whyStirring after the sugar dissolves drags crystals back into the syrup and the icing turns grainy. The cream of tartar is there for the same reason — it inverts some of the sucrose so it cannot re-crystallise. Wash any stray crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush instead of stirring.
- Pouring the syrupPour it into the beaten whites in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl with the mixer running. A dump of 240F syrup onto the beaters will spatter it in ribbons up the side of the bowl where it sets hard.
- Alternating light and darkAs written, all the icing becomes chocolate, so "alternating the light and dark layers" may refer to the cake's own light and dark layers rather than to two icings; if you want both, about half the white must be set aside before the chocolate goes in. Either way, spread while the icing is still warm and spreadable — once fully cold it stiffens and tears the crumb.
- The chocolateFour tablespoons of grated unsweetened chocolate is about 1 oz, or one square of baking chocolate. Grate it fine and cold so it disperses; melted chocolate added to a cooling meringue will seize into specks.
- Egg whitesThe hot syrup brings the whites up in temperature but this is not a fully cooked meringue. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised whites.
- YieldEnough to fill and cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Boiled icing is at its best the day it is made; it dries to a crust and turns chalky by the second day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households that bought Five Roses flour — a promotional cookbook of the kind flour and shortening companies produced in enormous numbers in the early twentieth century, and, by a claim often repeated though hard to document, one of the most widely owned books in Canadian kitchens for decades. Boiled icing of this sort belongs to the era before electric mixers were common: it demanded sustained hand-beating with a rotary egg beater until the meringue went cold, and the instructions are given by feel rather than by the clock — "beat until almost cool," then "beat until cold." Cream of tartar, a by-product of winemaking, had become a standard pantry item in North America by then, valued in confectionery precisely for its power to keep sugar syrups smooth.