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Chocolate Icing
1 T butter Vanilla Add enough hot coffee to mix so it will spread easily.
This entry has come down to us as a fragment: it names butter, vanilla and hot coffee, but the chocolate and sugar that give the icing its body have dropped out of the text somewhere between the church basement and the printer. What survives is really a method rather than a full formula.
- What is missingChocolate and sugar are absent from the printed list. A common icing of this general type begins with sifted confectioners' sugar (roughly 2 cups) and melted unsweetened chocolate (about 2 ounces, or 3-4 tablespoons cocoa), though the fragment does not tell us which form or proportion was intended. Without them the list cannot be followed as printed; the surviving line reads as the finishing step of such an icing.
- TOne tablespoon. American cookbooks of this kind commonly used T for tablespoon and t for teaspoon, often without a key, and the two are easy to confuse when the type is small.
- VanillaNo quantity is given. Half to one teaspoon of extract would be a reasonable modern reading. Bottled extract was commercially available in the period such collections were printed, and split beans steeped in sugar were also used.
- Hot coffee as the liquidThis is the point of the recipe. Coffee sharpens chocolate and deepens its color in a way milk does not, and hot liquid dissolves the sugar so the icing sets smooth instead of grainy. Brewed coffee, not grounds, and add it a teaspoon at a time.
- ConsistencyStop while the icing still holds a soft ridge from the spoon and slumps slowly. Powdered-sugar icings thicken as they cool, so an icing that spreads easily in the bowl will be stiff on the cake within a few minutes.
- Working timeSpread it at once. This kind of icing crusts on the surface quickly, and going back over a half-set patch tears the cake crumb up into it.
- YieldWith the sugar and chocolate missing, the yield cannot be fixed from the text; the single tablespoon of butter suggests a modest batch, perhaps enough for the top of one 8- or 9-inch layer or a thin coat over a small loaf cake.
Community cookbooks of this kind were often compiled by subscription: contributors sent in cards in their own shorthand, and the committee set them largely as received. That is why so many entries assume the reader already knows the base proportions and record only the household variation worth passing on — here, coffee instead of milk or water. Chocolate icings became common in American home baking in the later nineteenth century, as machine-processed cocoa and boxed confectioners' sugar made a no-cook icing practical; earlier, icing generally meant beaten egg white and pounded loaf sugar. The truncated ingredient list is a fair record of how these books functioned: not instruction for beginners, but reminders traded among cooks who had made the thing before.