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Five-Minute Frosting
1 C sugar 1 egg white 4 T water Boil all together in top of double boiler beating hard with Dover beater for five minutes, while the water boils hard in the lower boiler. Then add about 8 marshmallows and flavoring and spread on cake; will not harden or crack.
Mrs. Bert Steir. 1 C milk 1 T sugar
This is the boiled-meringue family of frostings — the same method as seven-minute frosting, with marshmallows folded in at the end to keep it soft. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: constant hard beating over boiling waterThe egg white and sugar must be beaten without pause while the water underneath boils vigorously. Stop beating and the whites cook into grainy threads; let the water only simmer and the sugar never dissolves, leaving a gritty frosting.
- Dover beaterA hand-cranked rotary eggbeater, the standard tool in American kitchens from the 1870s onward. A handheld electric mixer on medium-high does the same job; five minutes of cranking becomes about four to five minutes of mixing.
- Double boilerAny heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of boiling water works, provided the bowl does not touch the water. Metal transfers heat faster than glass and gets you to full volume sooner.
- MarshmallowsEight marshmallows is roughly a cup, loosely packed, or a scant cup of miniatures, assuming a marshmallow about the size of today's standard bagged ones; period sizes are not documented here. The recipe says only 'then add,' so the residual heat off the flame is enough to melt them if folded in gently.
- Egg safetyBeaten over hard-boiling water for a full five minutes, the mixture should reach the 160F range, so this is not an uncooked-egg frosting. Do not shorten the time to save trouble.
- FlavoringUnspecified, as was common in such recipes. Vanilla is the likeliest intent; half a teaspoon suits. Almond extract or a spoonful of strong coffee would also work with a marshmallow frosting.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One cup of sugar with a beaten white makes a generous, high-volume frosting; expect enough for the top and sides of a single layer, and possibly to fill and top two.
- Working timeSpread it while warm. It stays soft and glossy rather than setting hard, but it thickens as it cools and becomes difficult to move around on the cake.
- The stray line at the end"1 C milk, 1 T sugar" belongs to no part of this frosting. It most likely stems from the opening of an adjacent recipe on the original page; ignore it.
Boiled or "seven-minute" frosting spread through American community cookbooks in the early twentieth century, a diffusion often attributed to the arrival of cheap rotary eggbeaters, which made sustained beating possible for a home cook, and to granulated sugar reliable enough to make a clear syrup. The marshmallow addition here is generally associated with the 1920s and 30s, when commercially bagged marshmallows became a cheap pantry staple and turned up folded into frostings, sweet potato casseroles and fruit salads across the Midwest. The promise that it "will not harden or crack" is the whole selling point: plain boiled icing dries to a brittle shell, while the gelatin in the marshmallows is said to keep it pliable, a real advantage for a cake carried to a church supper and cut hours later. Attribution by name — credited in her husband's name, as was the convention — is typical of congregational fundraising cookbooks, where the byline was part of the point.