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Icings, Fillings, Etc
— Mrs. Wilson'S Decorative And Plain Icing
4 whites of eggs. 2 1/2 cups sugar. 1 cup water. 1 teaspoon lemon juice, or 1/2 teaspoon baking powder and tartaric acid mixed.
Cook syrup until it drops thick from spoon. Have whites beaten stiff and smooth with the half cup of sugar. Add syrup to eggs a little at a time, letting the last cook until it threads. After beating well, put over pan hot water and add powder. Cook until it piles without sinking, to decorate. Plain icing will not require so much cooking. The decorative icing can be beaten back smooth with a spoon. Use lemon if preferred to powder.
This is a boiled icing on the Italian meringue principle: hot sugar syrup beaten into stiff whites, then finished over hot water until it holds a piped shape. The instructions are compressed, and one or two figures need reading carefully.
- How the sugar splitsThe 2 1/2 cups is the total. Half a cup goes into the whites as they are beaten; the remaining 2 cups go into the pan with the 1 cup water to make the syrup.
- The syrup stageThe recipe gives two cues: "drops thick from spoon" for the syrup generally, and, for the last of it, "until it threads." These fall broadly in the thread-to-soft-ball range, which a thermometer puts somewhere around 230-240F, though the book names no temperature. Pour the syrup into the whites in a thin steady stream while beating, and do not scrape the pan.
- Powder and tartaric acidThe half teaspoon of "baking powder and tartaric acid mixed" supplies acid, which helps keep the meringue from weeping and graining; the baking powder component also lightens it. Cream of tartar is the usual modern stand-in for the acid, as is the teaspoon of lemon juice the recipe offers as an alternative.
- Over hot waterThe pan of hot water is in effect a double boiler, and the icing is worked over it rather than left to sit. The heat stiffens the meringue until it "piles without sinking"; the recipe gives no timing, so judge it by that cue alone.
- Decorative versus plainStop short of that stage for a soft spreading icing. For piping, take it to the point where a spoonful holds its shape on the surface; if it sets too hard in the bowl, beating it briskly with a spoon will bring it back smooth, as the recipe says.
- Weather mattersBoiled icings are humidity-sensitive; on a damp day the syrup is usually taken a little further, and the finished icing will still soften faster than a buttercream.
- Yield and keepingAbout 3 to 4 cups, enough to fill and cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Use it the day it is made; it crusts on the outside and will not survive refrigeration well.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal through the wartime conservation campaigns, and her cook book appeared around 1920; her books have the brisk, telegraphic register of newspaper column work rather than of leisured domestic manuals. Boiled icing of this kind was a common American cake finish before butter-based frostings took over: sugar was cheaper than butter, whites were a natural use for the yolks a rich cake had already consumed, and a well-beaten meringue held piped decoration better than plain confectioners' sugar and water. The alternative of "baking powder and tartaric acid mixed" in place of lemon juice is a period touch; cream of tartar is the modern equivalent, being the same tartaric chemistry in a more predictable package.