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Walnut Icing
1 egg. 1 cup brown sugar Butter size of walnut 1 cup chopped walnuts Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly.
Flavor with vanilla.
A penuche-style boiled icing compressed into two lines. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what boiled sugar should look like, and they leave out one thing you will need.
- The missing liquidAs printed there is no liquid at all — a cup of brown sugar with a knob of butter will scorch before it melts into anything spreadable. Icings of this type in the same era were made with about 1/4 to 1/3 cup of milk, cream or water; the omission looks like a typesetting loss rather than an intention.
- Butter size of walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon, about half an ounce. Nineteenth-century books often measured small quantities of fat against nuts and eggs, since household scales were not universal.
- What five minutes meansFive minutes at a full rolling boil takes a sugar syrup to about the soft-ball stage, 235-240F. A candy thermometer is more reliable than the clock, since pan width and heat output vary enormously.
- Stirring constantlyBrown sugar carries molasses solids that catch and burn readily. Constant stirring here is not optional, and a heavy-bottomed pan matters more than the recipe lets on.
- Add the nuts at the endWalnuts boiled in the syrup from the start risk scorching. A common practice is to boil the sugar mixture, remove it from the heat, beat in the vanilla, then fold in the nuts as it begins to thicken.
- Working timeBoiled brown-sugar icing sets fast as it cools. Have the cake ready and spread while the mixture still falls in a ribbon; if it grains up, a teaspoon of hot water beaten in will loosen it briefly.
- VanillaAbout a teaspoon. Add it off the heat — the alcohol carrying the flavour boils away in a hot syrup.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of icing: enough to top a single 8- or 9-inch layer.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed to buyers of Five Roses flour — one of the most widely circulated Canadian cookbooks of the early twentieth century, assembled largely from recipes sent in by housewives across the country. That origin explains the telegraphic style here: contributed recipes were printed close to how they arrived, with the household knowledge left unwritten. The icing itself belongs to the penuche family, brown sugar boiled to soft ball and beaten.