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Fudge Frosting
cup milk 2 squares chocolate 1 teaspoon vanilla Cook sugar, milk and chocolate six minutes; add butter; cook six minutes; add vanilla, and beat until of consistency to spread.
A boiled fudge frosting of the standard Lowney type: cook, cool slightly, beat to opacity, spread fast. The written quantities are incomplete, so treat the method rather than the amounts as the usable part.
- Missing amountsThe printed list gives no quantity for the sugar or the butter, and the milk is given only as "cup" with no number. Any modern attempt has to borrow proportions from a comparable boiled fudge frosting rather than from this line of text.
- Squares of chocolateA square in this period is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is two ounces. Lowney's was a chocolate manufacturer and the book assumes its own product; any unsweetened bar of similar cacao content behaves the same.
- Cook by temperature, not the clock"Six minutes" then "six minutes" depends entirely on the pan, the burner and the volume. Fudge frosting is finished when the syrup reaches the soft-ball stage, 234-240F on a candy thermometer; below that it never sets, above it turns to grainy candy.
- Butter goes in off the heatAdding butter partway through cooking, as written, is unusual. Many later versions stir it in after the syrup is off the heat, which cools the mixture and stops the cooking.
- Cool before beatingThe hinge of the whole thing. Beating while the syrup is still hot throws large sugar crystals and the frosting goes sandy; let it drop to about 110F, when the pan is warm rather than hot to the palm, then beat hard.
- Spreading windowOnce it thickens it sets within a minute or two. Have the cake out and level, and if the frosting stiffens in the bowl beat in a teaspoon of hot milk at a time to loosen it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no sugar quantity, so any yield is a guess; a boiled fudge frosting of this general scale would be expected to cover the top and sides of one 8- or 9-inch layer cake.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a genre of promotional cookbooks that let a firm put its product into domestic kitchens under the cover of general instruction. Fudge itself was a late nineteenth-century American arrival, generally traced to women's colleges in the northeast where students are said to have made it over gas lamps, and by the 1900s the technique had migrated onto cakes as a frosting: the same boiled sugar syrup, beaten to the point of crystallisation, but spread before it sets rather than poured into a pan. The distinction between a frosting and a candy here is purely one of timing.