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Cocoa Nougat Filling
teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teaspoon flavoring teaspoon salt 1 egg white 1 cup nut meats, cut very fine 1/4 cup Lowney's Cocoa 3 tablespoons powdered sugar 1 egg yolk ½ cup heavy cream Mix nut meats, egg yolk and powdered sugar; add cream beaten until stiff. Boil sugar and hot water until a thread is formed. Pour sugar mixture on to slightly beaten white of egg; add cream of tartar and flavoring, and beat until thick enough to spread. Add nut mixture, beat well, and spread over cakes.
NOTE. - If this mixture becomes too thick, it may be thinned by adding a small quantity of hot water.
This is a boiled-icing filling of the type common in American cake books a century ago, but only part of it ever meets heat. The points below explain where it fails and what its older terms mean.
- The raw yolk is the problemThe hot sugar syrup is poured onto the egg white only. The yolk goes into the nut and cream mixture and is never heated at any stage, then sits between cake layers at room temperature — conditions that suit Salmonella in shell eggs. Use a current filling recipe instead.
- The cream is also uncookedWhipped heavy cream folded in with a raw yolk gives the mixture a long unrefrigerated life on a cake that was not expected to be chilled. Nothing in the method reduces that risk.
- "Boil until a thread is formed"The thread stage is usually given as about 230-234F, when syrup drawn from the spoon falls in a fine strand. Books of this period leaned on such hand tests, thermometers being less common in home kitchens than they are now.
- "Flavoring"Most likely vanilla extract, the commonest choice of the day; almond or lemon extract would also suit.
- Cream of tartarAdded here after the syrup has gone into the white; it helps stabilise the foam and discourages the sugar from crystallising as the icing cools. Still sold under the same name.
- Powdered sugarA fine-ground sugar; in period usage the term did not always mean the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. It is used here only to bind the nuts and yolk, not to sweeten the boiled portion.
- Nut meatsSimply shelled nuts — walnuts, pecans or almonds — chopped fine enough not to tear the cake when spread.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, belongs to a genre of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that flooded American kitchens once packaged cocoa became a grocery staple: every chapter is an argument for keeping a tin of the company's cocoa on the shelf. Fillings like this one show the period's fondness for boiled icing, in which hot syrup poured over beaten egg white produces a glossy, marshmallow-like mass — a close relative of seven-minute frosting, which is instead beaten with sugar over hot water, and of the confection called nougat, from which this filling borrows both its name and its nuts. The recipe enriches the mixture with an uncooked yolk and whipped cream, at a time when the bacteriological risk of raw shell eggs was not yet part of household advice.