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Boiled Frosting (Pound marshmallows Heat)
pound marshmallows Heat marshmallows in oven; when puffed arrange on top of cake and pour Boiled Frosting over them. ½ cup butter
This is a fragment rather than a full recipe — a topping note that assumes you already have a batch of boiled frosting on the stove, and it has picked up a stray "½ cup butter" from a neighbouring entry. Read it as a finishing technique, not a standalone formula.
- The missing recipeBoiled frosting in books of this period is a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, about 238–240F, poured in a thin stream into stiffly beaten egg whites and beaten until it holds its shape. Roughly 1 cup sugar, 1/3 cup water and 1 egg white covers an 8-inch layer cake. The stray half-cup of butter belongs to some other recipe; boiled frosting contains none.
- The hingeThe frosting must go on while it is still hot and pourable. Poured over warm, puffed marshmallows it fuses with them into one glossy sheet; let it cool and stiffen first and you get separate lumps sitting under a crust.
- Puffing the marshmallowsThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'heat in oven'. In a modern oven around 350F they take roughly two to three minutes on a buttered sheet or directly on the cake. They go from puffed to browned to collapsed very quickly, so watch rather than time. A broiler works but gives you seconds of margin, not minutes.
- A pound of marshmallowsMarshmallows at this date were commonly sold by the pound rather than in fixed modern bags, and sizes were not standardised, so a pound is not a reliable guide to coverage. It is in any case a great deal — enough to cover the top of a large cake in a single layer. Judge by coverage, not by weight.
- What the marshmallows are forThey appear to be structural as much as decorative: the softened marshmallow keeps the frosting from soaking into the crumb and gives the top a padded, uneven surface.
- HumidityBoiled frosting is egg white and sugar and will weep on a damp day. Make it in dry weather, and serve the cake the day it is frosted; refrigeration turns the marshmallow layer tough.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer — one of a genre of cookbooks issued by food companies as advertising, which is why chocolate and confectionery run through it so heavily. Commercial marshmallows were still a fairly recent convenience at the time: the confection had largely moved off the actual marsh-mallow root and onto gelatin by the late nineteenth century, and by the 1900s they were being sold by the pound and turning up in cake toppings, fudge and salads. Boiled frosting itself is older and plainer, a domestic relative of Italian meringue that gave cooks a firm white icing without confectioners' sugar. Combining the two, as here, is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American home cooking — the household kitchen absorbing the candy shop's products and using them as ingredients.