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Cream Icing
8 tablespoons Pets cream. 4 cups XXXX sugar. 2 tablespoons butter. 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Cream butter and add sugar and cream. Put over hot water, add vanilla and stir into creamy icing. When taken off, let cool a little before icing cakes. If it gets stiff, beat and if necessary put back over hot water. This can be kept several days. If too hard after cooling, add cream.
To make chocolate icing, add cocoa to taste.
A simple double-boiler buttercream that leans on canned evaporated milk instead of dairy cream. Two of its terms are brand-and-trade shorthand that no longer reads clearly.
- "Pets cream"Pet was a widely sold brand of evaporated milk, not cream, so this most likely means plain unsweetened evaporated milk. Do not substitute sweetened condensed, which would make the icing cloying and soupy.
- XXXX sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Four cups is roughly a pound; sift it if it has caked, or the finished icing will be grainy.
- "Over hot water"A double boiler, or a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water. The point is gentle warmth to loosen the butter and dissolve the sugar; direct heat will scorch the sugar and split the mixture.
- Consistency is the whole recipePowdered sugar varies in how much liquid it absorbs, so treat the 8 tablespoons of evaporated milk as a starting point. Add it a spoonful at a time until the icing falls thickly from the spoon, and hold back the rest if it is already spreadable.
- CoolingWarm icing runs off the sides of a cake. Let it stand until it holds a soft ridge, then spread quickly; if it stiffens past that point, a few seconds back over the water and a hard beating will bring it round.
- Chocolate version"Cocoa to taste" is about 1/3 to 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa for this quantity. Cocoa is a drying powder, so expect to add another tablespoon or two of evaporated milk to compensate.
- YieldEnough to fill and cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake, or to top about two dozen cupcakes.
- Keeping itThe book says it can be kept several days, without saying how. Because it contains butter and milk, refrigerate it covered and bring it back to room temperature, then beat before use.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and the Philadelphia press during and just after the First World War, when butter, sugar, eggs and fresh cream were all under pressure from food-conservation campaigns. A recipe like this one points to the period's practical answer: canned evaporated milk, shelf-stable and available year-round, standing in for cream that would otherwise have to be bought fresh. Wilson names the brand outright, and trade names were used loosely as generic terms in household writing of the 1910s and 1920s. That habit is why "Pets cream" needs translating a century later, while the technique behind it butter and powdered sugar worked smooth over gentle heat is still the basis of a plain American buttercream.