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Cake Filli Ings and Icings: Icing
Plain Icing.
Pour 2 tablespoonfuls whipped cream into a bowl and sift over it sufficient confectioner's sugar to make an icing thick enough to spread. Flavor with any extract or fruit juice you desire to use.
Egg Icing.
White 1 egg, 1 cupful confectioner's sugar, 1 teaspoonful lemon juice.
Whip the white of egg unti frothy, beat in the lemon juice, then the sugar, until the icing is of a con sistency that will spread.
White-Mountain Icing. 1 cupful granulated sugar, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexi can Vanilla, cupful water, White 1 egg.
Bring the water to the boil, ado the sugar, and let the sirup cook without stirring until it will thread when lifted on the tip of a spoon Pour it boiling hot over the white of egg which has been beaten to a stifi froth. Whip the mixture till it is soft and creamy, add the flavoring and pour over the cake, spreading i smooth with a palette knife dipped in cold water.
Three icings of increasing ambition: a cream-and-sugar glaze, an uncooked meringue, and a boiled-syrup frosting. The middle one is the problem, and the third has a measurement missing from the printed page.
- Why the cautionEgg Icing is raw egg white, beaten with sugar and lemon juice and spread on a finished cake. Nothing in it ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the icing then sits at room temperature on the cake, which is exactly the condition the pathogen likes. Acid from a teaspoon of lemon juice does not sterilize it. Use a current royal-icing recipe if you need a spreadable white icing.
- The boiled icing is a different case, but not a sterile oneWhite-Mountain Icing pours hot syrup over beaten white, the method later books call boiled frosting. Poured syrup heats the egg only partway and unevenly; the related seven-minute frosting is instead held over simmering water and beaten as it heats.
- The missing fractionThe original reads "cupful water" for the syrup, with the fraction lost in printing. Period proportions for a boiled-icing syrup run around one-third cup water to one cup sugar; the text as printed cannot be followed literally.
- "Will thread" means a thermometer reading"Will thread" -- Syrup that spins a thread from a spoon tip corresponds to what later books call the thread stage, roughly 223-235F, though the recipe gives no thermometer reading. Taken much further the frosting tends to set hard; taken too little it stays loose.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA period brand name printed inside the ingredient list. Any vanilla extract does the same work; use a teaspoon.
- Confectioner's sugarFinely powdered sugar, by this period usually cut with a little starch. Sift it, as the text says, or the plain icing will be gritty and streaked.
- The whipped cream in Plain IcingTwo tablespoons of whipped cream will take a good deal of sifted sugar; the recipe leaves the quantity open, so add until it is thick enough to spread. This one is a glaze, not a frosting: it sets soft, will not hold a pattern, and should be spread and eaten the same day, refrigerated.
- Palette knifeAn artist's flat, flexible steel blade, then a common kitchen tool. An offset icing spatula is the modern equivalent, and dipping it in cold water still keeps the frosting from dragging.
- YieldThe text gives no yield. The boiled icing whips up to enough for the top and sides of a layer cake; the two-tablespoon cream glaze makes considerably less, enough for the top of one layer.
Boiled icing of this kind was a common American cake finish before buttercream displaced it in the mid-twentieth century, and the name "White Mountain" attached itself to the version made with hot sugar syrup rather than plain beaten white. The dessert usually credited with popularizing it, White Mountain cake, is generally traced to New England, though whether the name refers to the New Hampshire range or simply to the drifted white surface of the frosting is not settled.