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Yellow Icing
Yolks 4 eggs beaten light. 2 cups sugar. 1 cup water. Cook syrup until it drops from spoon, beat gradually into eggs, cooking syrup all the time until the last is used. When cool, flavor with orange and spread between cake before it gets stiff. Nuts can be added to filling.
This is a cooked-syrup yolk icing, the same method as a pâte à bombe, and it stands or falls on how the hot syrup meets the eggs. The instructions are compressed almost to the point of shorthand, so a few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: a thin, steady streamHave the yolks already beaten pale and keep the beater running while you add the syrup in a slow trickle down the side of the bowl. Dumped in, the syrup scrambles the yolks into sweet lumps that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- "Until it drops from spoon"A hand test for the syrup's thickness, in the general neighbourhood of thread stage on a candy thermometer. Cooking a little further, toward soft ball, gives a firmer filling that sets more reliably; stopped too early it will stay loose.
- "Cooking syrup all the time until the last is used"The syrup is meant to stay on the heat while you ladle it out, so the last of it is as hot as the first. On a modern burner keep it over the lowest heat, or pull it off and work fast — it thickens and candies quickly.
- Egg safetyHot syrup will raise the yolks a long way, but a slow trickle at thread stage does not reliably bring the mixture to 160F, and this icing is not cooked again afterwards. If you want certainty, or the icing is going to sit out, use pasteurized eggs.
- Beating timeKeep beating after the last of the syrup is in, five to eight minutes with a stand mixer, until the bowl is no longer warm to the touch. This is what thickens it; stopping early leaves a syrupy filling that runs out of the cake.
- Flavoring with orangeGrated zest from one orange plus a teaspoon of the juice, or half a teaspoon of orange extract. Add it once the mixture is cool — volatile citrus oils go flat if beaten into anything hot.
- Timing the spreadThis icing sets as it cools and will not spread once stiff. Have the cake layers cooled and ready before you start the syrup, and work it onto the cake while it still moves under the knife.
- Yield and keepingTwo cups of sugar and four yolks make roughly two and a half cups, enough to fill and top a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Because it is egg-based it wants refrigeration, and it is best the day it is made.
- Filed under VegetablesThe section heading is a printing or indexing artifact rather than any instruction about the recipe. Nothing here belongs to a vegetable dish.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and worked as a domestic-science instructor in Philadelphia, and her cookbooks come out of the food-conservation years around the First World War, when using up what was already in the kitchen was a moral as much as an economic matter. A yolk icing is exactly that kind of recipe: white cakes, angel food and meringues eat enormous quantities of egg whites and leave the yolks behind, and cooks kept a standing repertoire of yolk custards, yolk sauces and yolk icings to absorb them. The technique — hot sugar syrup beaten into eggs until the mass cools and thickens — is the same one French pastry calls a pâte à bombe, and it appears throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American books under plainer names like boiled icing or cooked frosting. Made with whites rather than yolks it becomes boiled icing, or Italian meringue, still the more familiar survivor of the pair.