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Cake Filli Ings and Icings: Frosting
Chocolate Frosting. cupful cream, 1½ squares Runkel's Chocolate, ¼ egg, teaspoonful butter, ½ teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, Confectioner's sugar.
Put the chocolate in a bowl to melt over hot water, scald the cream and pour over it, add the beaten yolk of egg and butter. Beat with a fork and sift in enough confectioner's sugar to make it of the proper consistency; last of all put in the vanilla, and spread over the cake. This frosting used on layers of white cake with chocolate filling between makes a delicious combination. Orange Frosting.
Rind 1 orange, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 3 tablespoonfuls orange juice, 1 teaspoonful lemon juice, Confectioner's sugar.
Sift into the orange juice and rind enough confectioner's sugar to make this frosting spread.
Coffee Frosting.
Use the recipe given for White- Mountain frosting, only substitute cupful strong coffee for boiling water, and leave out any flavoring. Caramel Frosting. cupful cream, Dash salt, 2 tablespoonfuls caramel, 1 cupful light-brown sugar.
Boil together the brown sugar and cream for five minutes, then add the caramel and salt. Beat till cool and creamy, and pour while warm over the cake.
Maple-Sugar Frosting. 4 tablespoonfuls boiling water, pound maple sugar, White 1 egg.
Boil the sugar and water together till it spins a thread. Pour over the white of egg beaten till stiff, and whip till thick enough to spread.
Fondant Icing. 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar, 1 cupful boiling water, 1 tablespoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Mix the sugar and cream of tartar together, pour the water over it, and boil till it forms a little soft ball when dropped into cold water. Pour it out on an oiled platter, beat and knead till of the consistency of lard.
Allow it to cool. When ready to use, soften it over boiling water, stirring with a fork till it is creamy. Add the flavoring, and pour over the cake. By first using this icing on a cake, then covering when hard and smooth with Runkel's Sweet Chocolate melted, you have what is called a chocolate-cream icing. the Decorating Icing. - Whip whites of 2 eggs to a very stiff froth, then add slowly powdered sugar until the mixture is so stiff that every point and thread left by the beater will hold its place. It requires beating a long time. It is the same as meringue mixture, except that it is made hard with sugar instead of by drying, and takes about ½ cupful sugar to each egg.-MARY RONALD.
A run of seven frostings from the era when "confectioner's sugar to make it of the proper consistency" was considered instruction enough. Several depend on sugar-syrup stages that are worth reading as thermometer numbers.
- The missing quantitiesFour of these recipes call for a "cupful" of cream, a "pound" of maple sugar and a "cupful" of strong coffee with the fraction dropped. In the caramel frosting, half a cup of cream is the likeliest reading against the cup of brown sugar; the chocolate frosting gives no measured sugar to judge by, and the maple quantity is genuinely ambiguous and should be judged by the syrup stage rather than the weight.
- Squares of chocolateRunkel's was a New York chocolate house; a "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 1½ oz. Their "sweet chocolate" for the chocolate-cream icing is closest to a modern dark eating chocolate, not couverture.
- The vanillaMcIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla was a branded extract, and any good vanilla extract stands in at the same measure. A tablespoon in the fondant is not a misprint, but it is assertive by current taste.
- Syrup stages as numbers"Spins a thread" is 230-234F; the "little soft ball when dropped into cold water" for the fondant is 235-240F. A thermometer removes much of the guesswork here, and fondant boiled well past 240F sets harder and is likelier to turn out coarse.
- Caramel means burnt sugarThe two tablespoonfuls of "caramel" in the caramel frosting is not caramel candy or sauce but the old kitchen staple of sugar melted to a dark liquid and thinned with a little water, kept in a bottle for colour and flavour.
- White Mountain frostingThe coffee frosting refers to a recipe elsewhere in the book: a boiled sugar syrup whipped into stiff egg whites. Strong coffee replaces the water volume for volume.
- Raw whites in the decorating icingThis one, and the royal-icing style piping it is meant for, is never heated at any point. Pasteurized egg whites or meringue powder give the same stiff peaks without the risk, particularly if the cake is to sit out or be eaten by anyone vulnerable.
- Working the fondant"Consistency of lard" is the target after kneading, and it should be left to rest before use. Reheat it gently over water only until it pours; taken too hot it loses its gloss and sets dull and chalky.
Community and promotional cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s sat squarely at the point where American home baking met brand-name groceries, which is why Runkel Brothers chocolate and McIlhenny's vanilla appear here by name rather than as plain ingredients. The frostings themselves trace the technical divide of the period: the boiled-syrup icings, of which White Mountain frosting was the best-known American example, relied on a cook's ability to judge sugar by thread and ball stages, while the newer "confectioner's sugar to the proper consistency" method depended on the availability of cheap finely milled sugar and asked no skill at all. The final entry is credited to Mary Ronald, whose Century Cook Book of 1895 was among the more carefully written American manuals of the decade, and her note that decorating icing is simply meringue "made hard with sugar instead of by drying" is the sort of explanation of why a thing works that most books of the era did not bother to give.