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Maple Filling
1 cup maple syrup 1 egg white ½ cup beaten cream few grains salt Boil syrup until it threads; pour on to the beaten white; add cream, salt, and beat until thick enough to spread.
A boiled-syrup meringue lightened with whipped cream, meant for spreading between cake layers. It comes together in minutes once the syrup is at the right stage, so have the egg white and cream ready before the pan goes on.
- "Boil until it threads"Thread stage is usually given as about 230-235F on a thermometer — the syrup falls from the spoon in a fine thread rather than in drops. Boiled much beyond that the filling will set firmer and is harder to spread.
- Pour slowlyThe hinge of the recipe: add the hot syrup to the stiffly beaten white in a thin, steady stream at the edge of the bowl while beating constantly. Dumped in at once it cooks the white into threads of sweet omelette.
- "½ cup beaten cream"Half a cup of cream, whipped to soft peaks. The recipe's phrase "beaten cream" leaves it unclear whether the half cup is measured before or after whipping. Beat it in after the meringue has cooled towards room temperature, or the cream will slacken.
- Maple syrupUse real syrup, not pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavouring and behaves differently on the stove. A darker grade (formerly "Grade B", now Grade A Dark or Very Dark) gives the maple flavour the recipe assumes.
- Egg whiteSyrup at thread stage does not reliably pasteurize the white in a mixture this small. If the filling is for someone pregnant, elderly, or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites or carton egg white.
- YieldRoughly 1½ to 2 cups, depending how much air is beaten in — enough to fill and lightly top a two-layer 8-inch cake.
- KeepingBecause of the cream this is not a shelf-stable frosting. Fill the cake the day it is served and refrigerate; it softens and separates by the second day.
Lowney's Cook Book was published for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other house cookbooks of the period it surrounds its chocolate recipes with the wider repertoire a New England housekeeper expected — including the maple fillings, frostings, and sugars that came out of the spring sugaring season in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Quebec. Boiled-syrup meringue of this kind is the same technique as the era's "boiled frosting" made with cane sugar, with maple syrup standing in for both the sugar and the water; the addition of whipped cream is what turns it from a frosting that dries firm into a soft filling. Maple was the cheaper sweetener in rural New England well into the nineteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it had become the more expensive and more prized one.