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Seven-Minute Marshmallow Frosting
1 egg white 7-8 C sugar 3 T water 12 marshmallows cut up 1 t vanilla Put egg, sugar and water in double boiler, set over rapidly boiling water, and beat constantly with egg beater for exactly seven minutes (after it starts to cook). Remove from stove, add marshmallows and vanilla and beat until right consistency to spread. Two teaspoons of cocoa may be added, if desired.
Mrs. B. H. Whitman.
A standard seven-minute frosting with marshmallows folded in at the end, from an era when a hand egg beater was the only tool for the job. One printing quirk needs sorting out before you start.
- The sugar is a fraction, not a number"7-8 C sugar" is a typesetting of 7/8 cup, which is the correct proportion for a single egg white. Seven to eight cups would be absurd. Use 7/8 cup (about 175 g) granulated sugar.
- Scale to your cakeOne egg white makes roughly 2 cups of finished frosting — enough for a single 8-inch layer top, or a dozen cupcakes. For a two-layer cake, double or triple everything.
- The seven minutes are literalTiming starts when the water below is at a rolling boil and the mixture is warm, not when the pan goes on the stove. The bowl should not touch the water. A hand mixer on medium-high does the work an egg beater once did; stop at seven minutes, when the frosting holds a firm peak.
- MarshmallowsUse about 12 standard marshmallows, or roughly the same volume in minis. Add them off the heat and beat -- the residual warmth melts them into the meringue and gives the frosting its body and gloss.
- Temperature and raw eggBeaten over boiling water for a full seven minutes, the whites should reach the 160F that pasteurizes them, but a domestic double boiler is not a reliable thermometer. If you are feeding anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, start with pasteurized egg white and check with an instant-read thermometer.
- CocoaTwo teaspoons of cocoa beaten in at the end tints and flavors lightly. Sift it first — unsweetened cocoa clumps stubbornly in a meringue and will not beat smooth.
- HumidityBoiled and seven-minute frostings weep and go sticky in damp weather. Make it on a dry day, spread it swirled rather than smooth, and serve the cake the same day; it crusts on the outside and softens overnight.
Seven-minute frosting is the stovetop cousin of boiled icing: instead of cooking a sugar syrup to the soft-ball stage and pouring it into beaten whites, the cook heats sugar, water and white together over steam and beats until the sugar dissolves and the foam sets. It spread through American home cooking in the early twentieth century, when the hand-cranked rotary egg beater made sustained whipping possible without a second pair of arms. The marshmallows are the modern touch of this version -- by the 1900s marshmallows were a manufactured confection of sugar, corn syrup and gelatin rather than the old apothecary's paste of marsh mallow root, and cooks began dropping them into frostings, fudges and puddings for the body the gelatin gave. Community cookbooks like this one, credited contributor by contributor, are one record of how such factory novelties entered ordinary kitchens.