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Eight-Minute Icing
3 T cold water Vanilla Mix together in top of double boiler. Place over boiling water, beat steadily with Dover egg beater for from six to eight minutes or until it piles up and stays in pile when dropped from egg beater. Add one-half teaspoon vanilla before applying to cake.
Mrs. F. P. Dymond.
Note:-Mrs. A. Kruckman uses 4 Tablespoons cold water when using this recipe. 14 C butter
This is the church-cookbook version of what most American books call seven-minute frosting, and the page as printed has lost part of its ingredient list in transcription. Read the points below before you start.
- The ingredient list is incompleteAs printed, the recipe gives only cold water, vanilla and a stray "14 C butter" (almost certainly 1/4 cup, dropped to the end of the entry). A frosting cannot pile up in a peak from water alone: the sugar and egg white that make this method work are missing from the text. Anyone wanting to make it should work from a complete modern seven-minute frosting recipe and treat this page as a record rather than a set of instructions.
- What the proportions normally wereBooks of this period generally pair 3 tablespoons cold water with one unbeaten egg white and about a cup of granulated sugar, sometimes with a pinch of cream of tartar. That is the shape of the recipe Mrs. Dymond was almost certainly writing down, but it is inference, not what the page says.
- AbbreviationsT is tablespoon and C is cup; the contributor's note spelling out "4 Tablespoons" confirms the first. Lower-case t, if it appears elsewhere in the book, would be teaspoon.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, the standard American kitchen tool of the era. A hand-held electric mixer on medium-high does the same job and will hold a steady speed for the full eight minutes, which is the part that matters.
- Over the water, not in itThe upper pan should sit above briskly boiling water without touching it. Direct contact overheats the sugar syrup at the base and gives you grainy frosting or scrambled specks of egg.
- The hinge is the visual test, not the clockSix to eight minutes is a guide; the recipe tells you the real signal, which is that the mixture piles up and holds its shape when dropped from the beater. On a humid day it can take noticeably longer, and undercooked seven-minute frosting weeps and slides off the cake.
- Vanilla goes in lastThe recipe adds it at the end, before the frosting goes on the cake. Beaten in early, the alcohol carries much of the flavour off in the steam.
- Apply at onceThis frosting sets with a thin crust and stops spreading within a few minutes of leaving the pan. Have the cake cooled and assembled before you begin beating.
Boiled icings of this family were a fixture of American cake baking from the late nineteenth century onward, and the rotary egg beater made them far easier: whipping egg white and hot syrup to a stiff gloss by hand with a fork or a bundle of twigs was tedious work, while the geared beater made by the Dover Stamping Company — whose name became a generic term for the tool, much as "Hoover" did later — did the work quickly. The double-boiler method was the domestic-science era's tidy answer to the older true boiled icing, which required pouring a candy syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage into beaten whites and judging temperature by eye. Its appearance here, with a second contributor's note that she prefers four tablespoons of water, is characteristic of community cookbooks: recipes were collected from contributors as they actually cooked them, disagreements and all, and the compilers saw no reason to reconcile the two women's practice into a single ruling.