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Maple Icing
Mrs. W. J. Dillon. 12 t butter 2 T milk 1 1/2 C. confectioner's sugar 12 t baking powder 1/2 t maple flavoring Add butter to hot milk, add sugar slowly to make a paste the right consistency to spread. Add baking powder and flavoring, and spread over top and sides of layers.
A simple butter-and-milk glaze thickened with confectioner's sugar, typical of church-supper cookbooks where icings were made in a cup with a spoon. Two of the quantities have been garbled in printing and need judgment.
- The garbled measurements"12 t butter" and "12 t baking powder" are almost certainly ½ teaspoon (or in the case of the butter, possibly ½ tablespoon) rendered without the fraction bar. Twelve teaspoons of baking powder in a cup and a half of sugar would be inedible; read both as ½ t.
- Consistency is the real instructionThe sugar quantity is a starting point, not a rule. Add it to the hot milk and butter a spoonful at a time and stop when the icing falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and holds a line; too thin and it runs off the sides, too thick and it tears the crumb.
- Why baking powder is in thereA little baking powder turns up in some old boiled and paste icings; it is said to lighten the color and soften the set slightly. It is not leavening anything here and can be left out with no harm.
- Maple flavoringThis means the bottled extract, which was often an imitation rather than true maple. Real maple extract works, or replace the 2 tablespoons of milk with 2 tablespoons of warm maple syrup and cut the sugar back slightly.
- Hot milk mattersThe milk should be hot enough to melt the butter completely; a broken, greasy emulsion is the usual failure. Sift the confectioner's sugar if it has lumps, since there is no cooking step to dissolve them.
- YieldRoughly three quarters of a cup to a cup — enough to cover the top and sides of a single 8-inch layer, or to fill and top a two-layer cake thinly. Double it for generous coverage of a two-layer cake.
- Spreading windowPaste icings of this kind stiffen as they cool. Spread while still warm and work quickly; if it sets before you finish, warm the bowl briefly over hot water rather than adding more milk.
Icings like this one belong to the period between the old boiled sugar frostings, which required a candy thermometer's worth of judgment over a fire, and the modern buttercream. Commercially milled confectioner's sugar became cheaper and more widely available in American groceries over the later nineteenth century, and it put a spreadable icing within reach of any cook with a cup of hot milk and a spoon — which is part of why these recipes are common in community cookbooks. Maple flavoring points the same direction: bottled extracts, often imitations rather than true maple, let a congregation put a maple-flavored cake on the table in any season without a sugarbush. The attribution to Mrs. W. J. Dillon is the whole apparatus of these books, where recipes traveled under the name of the woman who vouched for them.