Filling
1 minced orange. 1 banana--sliced. Juice 1/2 lemon. 1 can pineapple chopped fine. 1/2 cup sugar.
Ice on top with the following icing: Take syrup of pineapple, boil with sugar, allowing two cups to one of juice, break two eggs to each cup of sugar, beat whites stiff; when syrup cooks thick and threads, pour gradually over the eggs; cook over steam to the right consistency to ice cake. Delicious.
This is a layer-cake filling with a boiled meringue icing, written in the compressed style of a recipe copied from a card. The filling has no cooking step at all; the work is all in the icing.
- The hinge: the thread stage"Cooks thick and threads" means the syrup has reached roughly 230-235F, when a spoonful falls in a thin thread. Below that the icing stays soupy; much above it and the meringue turns grainy. A candy thermometer removes the guesswork.
- Pour thin and slowWith the whites already beaten stiff and the mixer running, add the hot syrup in a thin stream down the side of the bowl. Dumping it in cooks the whites into threads of sweet scrambled egg.
- "Two eggs to each cup of sugar"Only the whites are used, as the next clause makes clear. Two whites per cup of sugar sits within the usual range for a boiled or seven-minute icing, though period recipes vary from one white per cup upward.
- "Cook over steam"A double boiler over simmering water, not direct heat. Beat continuously for five to seven minutes until the icing holds a peak and the mixture reaches about 160F, which also settles any worry about uncooked whites.
- A can of pineappleProbably a No. 2 can, about 20 oz of pineapple in syrup, though No. 2 1/2 was also sold and the recipe does not say. Drain it well and reserve the syrup, since the icing is built on it; the icing's proportions imply about a cup of juice.
- The filling is uncookedNothing in the fruit mixture is heated, so it stays loose and will weep. Drain the pineapple thoroughly, add the sugar shortly before assembling, and spread it between layers of a firm cake rather than a delicate sponge.
- YieldProbably enough filling and icing for a modest layer cake, though the recipe gives no yield or cake size. Both are best used the day they are made; boiled icing tends to dry and crack after that.
Boiled icing of this kind, hot sugar syrup beaten into egg whites, was a standard American cake frosting before butter creams took over, and it is closely related to the "seven-minute" icing that survives in older community cookbooks. What dates this particular version is the canned pineapple: Hawaiian pineapple canning expanded enormously in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and by the 1920s a can of pineapple was a cheap pantry staple rather than a luxury. Using the drained syrup as the base of the icing is thrift of exactly the sort urged in the food-conservation advice of the First World War years; nothing from the can is thrown away, and the fruit flavors both halves of the dish.