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Caramel Filling
1 cup cream cup sugar 2 tablespoons butter 6 tablespoons caramelized sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Cook butter, sugar, and cream together until it threads. Add caramelized sugar and flavoring. Cool and fill. 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 2 egg yolks
A boiled cream caramel filling of the type used between layers of a plain butter cake. The text as printed has suffered: one quantity has dropped out and three ingredients from the following recipe have run onto the end.
- The missing quantity"1 cup cream cup sugar" has lost the sugar measure in setting; a fraction dropping out is the commonest cause. The amount cannot be recovered from the page. A cup of sugar to a cup of cream is one workable reading, but a half or three-quarter cup is equally possible.
- The stray last line"1 cup milk, 1 tablespoon butter, 2 egg yolks" belongs to the next recipe in the book, not to this one. Ignore it entirely.
- "Until it threads"The thread stage is 230-234F on a candy thermometer: a drop lifted on a spoon pulls a fine thread two inches or so before breaking. This is the hinge of the recipe. Under-cooked, the filling runs out of the cake; taken past the soft-ball stage it sets hard and grainy.
- Caramelized sugarThis means liquid caramel, made separately by melting sugar dry in a heavy pan until deep amber, sometimes loosened with a little boiling water. It is added off the heat here for colour and flavour.
- Pan and stirringUse a heavy saucepan wider than it is deep, and stir with care rather than constantly; cream and sugar scorch quickly at the bottom. Wash sugar crystals from the sides with a wet brush if you see them.
- Cooling and consistencyCool to lukewarm before beating and spreading. Warm, it slides; cold and unbeaten, it stiffens. If it sets too firm, a spoonful of hot cream beaten in will bring it back.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of filling, enough for two or three layers of an eight- or nine-inch cake, or a thick filling for one.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and like most maker-sponsored cookbooks of the early 1900s it pairs promotional chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire. Caramel fillings belong to the era's layer-cake habit, when a plain cake was defined less by its crumb than by what went between the layers, and "caramel" in American kitchens of the day meant burnt sugar syrup rather than the chewy confection the word now suggests. Keeping a bottle of caramelized sugar in the pantry, to colour gravies and sauces as well as sweets, is often said to have been a common household habit; it is assumed here without explanation, as is the cook's ability to judge the thread by eye long before thermometers were common in home kitchens.