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Cherry Cake Icing
Allow four tablespoons of cherry juice to one cup granulated sugar, cooking together until the syrup threads. Beat this into the stiff-whipped white of an egg.
A boiled or Italian-style meringue icing, tinted and flavoured with cherry juice instead of water. The whole thing turns on the syrup temperature, which the original describes only by eye.
- Thread stage, in numbersSyrup "threads" at about 230-235F on a candy thermometer, when a spoonful drops in a fine strand rather than in beads. Modern boiled icings usually go a little further, to 238-240F (soft ball), which sets firmer and holds its shape on a cake.
- Scale and yieldThe original gives no yield. One cup sugar, four tablespoons juice and one egg white makes only a small quantity of icing, probably enough to cover a single 8-inch layer thinly; double it for a two-layer cake.
- The hinge: pour, do not dumpWhip the white to stiff peaks before the syrup is ready, then add the hot syrup in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl while beating continuously. Poured in all at once it cooks the white into threads and the icing breaks.
- Cherry juiceUse juice pressed from fresh sour cherries or the syrup drained from a jar of preserved ones. Sour cherry juice gives better colour, and its acidity can help keep the sugar from crystallising; sweet-cherry juice gives a paler result.
- Egg whitesThe syrup partly cooks the white but does not reliably pasteurise it at thread stage. If the icing is for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised egg whites, sold in cartons.
- Beating to finishKeep beating after all the syrup is in, five to eight minutes with a stand mixer, until the bowl is only just warm and the icing holds a glossy peak. Stopping while it is hot gives a runny glaze that slides off the cake.
- Use it at onceBoiled icing sets as it cools and cannot be rewarmed successfully. Have the cake cooled and on its plate before the syrup goes on the heat.
Boiled icing of this kind, sometimes called American frosting or, in its finer form, Italian meringue, spread through English-language cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, once reliable granulated sugar and hand-cranked egg beaters made whipping a white to stiffness a matter of a few minutes. Recipes of the sort collected in single-fruit chapters like this one show the period's habit of pushing one ingredient through an entire menu, down to the juice that colours and flavours the icing so nothing is wasted. Before commercial food colouring was common in domestic kitchens, fruit juices and beet water were the usual way to get pink into a frosting.