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Seafoam Icing
3 cups granulated sugar. 1 1/2 cups hot water. 2 egg whites. Boil sugar and water until it threads; beat whites very stiff; add one tablespoon granulated sugar and beat smooth. Pour over this the sirup little at a time; flavor with vanilla. When ready to use, stir into this one cup of nuts and raisins if liked; spread filling with nuts and ice plain on top.
A boiled-syrup meringue icing, of the type now usually called Italian meringue. The original assumes you can read a syrup by eye; a thermometer removes the guesswork.
- The hinge: the thread stage"Until it threads" means roughly 230-235F, when a spoonful drawn up falls in a thin thread rather than in drops. Below that the icing stays soupy and never sets; taken much further it tends to stiffen and turn grainy on the cake.
- Long boil, plenty of waterThree cups sugar to 1 1/2 cups water is a thin syrup by modern standards and will take a good while of steady boiling to reach thread stage. Do not stir once it boils, and wash any crystals down from the pan sides with a wet brush.
- Egg whites and hot syrupTwo whites carry three cups of sugar only if they are beaten to stiff peaks first and the syrup goes in as a slow, thin stream against the side of the bowl. Poured in a rush it cooks the whites into threads and the icing breaks.
- The extra tablespoon of sugarBeating a spoonful of granulated sugar into the stiff whites stabilises them before the syrup arrives. It is worth doing rather than skipping.
- Beat until coolThe recipe stops short of saying it: keep beating after all the syrup is in, until the bowl is no longer warm to the hand. Icing spread while hot will slump and weep.
- Nuts and raisinsFold these in only at the last moment and only into the portion used as filling, as the original directs. Left to stand in the icing, raisins bleed and nut oils dull the gloss.
- YieldEnough to fill and cover a two-layer 9-inch cake with some to spare. It is at its best the day it is made; refrigeration makes it sticky.
Seafoam icing is generally taken to be named for texture rather than flavour: the boiled syrup beaten into egg white sets to a light, foamy crust over a soft interior. Recipes of this family appear under many names in American books from the late nineteenth century onward, and some versions use brown sugar, which gives the pale grey-tan colour the name is often said to describe. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the *Ladies' Home Journal*, and her cookbook belongs to the years just after the First World War. The technique is the same one that produces Italian meringue, and it survives in modern pastry work.