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Ornamental Frosting
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar 1/2 cup water 2 egg whites 1 teaspoon flavoring extract 1/2 teaspoon Royal Baking Powder Boil sugar and water over slow fire until, when tested in a little cold water, it will hold its shape; add this syrup very slowly to the beaten whites of eggs; add flavoring and baking powder and beat until smooth and stiff enough to spread. Put over boiling water, stirring continually until the icing grates slightly on bottom of bowl. Spread on cake saving a small portion of the icing to ornament the edge of cake. This can be forced through a pastry tube, or, if none is available, through a cornucopia, made from ordinary white letter paper.
This is an Italian-style boiled meringue frosting, dressed up with a spoonful of the sponsor's product. The technique is sound; only the vocabulary and the vagueness about temperature need translating.
- The hinge: add the syrup in a thin streamWith the mixer running, pour the hot syrup down the inside of the bowl in a slow, steady thread onto the whites already beaten to soft peaks. Dumping it in cooks the whites into scrambled threads, and pouring onto the whip flings syrup up the sides of the bowl where it sets into candy.
- "Hold its shape" in cold waterMost likely the soft-ball stage, somewhere around 235-240F on a thermometer. The syrup dropped into cold water should form a ball that flattens between the fingers rather than dissolving or turning brittle.
- "Slow fire"Medium-low heat, uncovered, without stirring once the sugar has dissolved. Wash down any crystals on the pan sides with a wet brush; a single stray crystal will seed the whole batch grainy.
- The baking powderHalf a teaspoon of baking powder in frosting reads as a house advertisement more than a necessity; Royal's powder was cream-of-tartar based, so it brings a little acid and some gas into the mixture. Cream of tartar, about 1/4 teaspoon added to the whites before beating, is the more usual way to stabilize them.
- The step over boiling waterSetting the bowl over simmering water and stirring until the icing "grates slightly" drives off moisture and firms the icing. Stop the moment you feel that grittiness on the bottom of the bowl; past it the frosting turns dry and refuses to spread.
- Flavoring extractOne teaspoon of vanilla, almond or lemon, stirred in off the heat so the alcohol does not flash away. Almond extract today is benzaldehyde-based and safe; period recipes sometimes meant bitter almond water, which is not.
- Paper cornucopiaA cone rolled from stiff paper, snipped at the tip. Parchment triangles do the same job better, and a small disposable piping bag better still. Ornamental frosting sets fast, so pipe the reserved portion before it stiffens in the bowl.
- Yield and weatherRoughly enough to cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake, though the recipe gives no yield. Boiled frostings are unhappy in humid weather, staying tacky and weeping; make them on a dry day and serve the cake the same day, as the icing crusts and cracks by the second.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a long line of promotional cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which from the late nineteenth century onward distributed large numbers of small recipe books in which its cream-of-tartar powder turns up in places it has no real business being, frosting among them. The frosting itself is standard turn-of-the-century confectionery practice: a sugar syrup boiled to soft ball and beaten into egg whites, the same method that underlies Italian meringue and, with the syrup boiled harder, divinity candy. "Ornamental frosting" was used in period books for icing firm enough to hold a piped line, though the term also covered uncooked egg-white-and-sugar royal icing, and the instruction to improvise a cone from letter paper suggests the pastry bag was not standard equipment in every American kitchen.