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Frosting for Tomato Soup Cake
Take 1 package of Philadelphia cream cheese, add tablespoon melted butter, teaspoon of vanilla, and powdered sugar to spreading consistency.
This may sound like a vile concoction and it'd be hard to find in an ordinary kitchen cookbook, but just wait until you've tried it!"
A cream cheese frosting from the era before the style was standard, meant for a spice-heavy tomato soup cake. The quantities are loose by design; only the sugar is variable.
- Package size'A package' of Philadelphia is ambiguous: the brand was sold in small (3 oz) as well as 8 oz packages, and the recipe gives no clue which is meant. If you work from a modern 8 oz brick, either use about half of it or scale the butter and vanilla up accordingly.
- Powdered sugar quantityFor about 3 oz of cheese with a tablespoon of butter, expect roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of sifted confectioners' sugar. Add it in stages and stop when it spreads, which is the only test the recipe gives.
- Temperature is the hingeHave the cheese at room temperature and the melted butter only just liquid. Warm butter poured into cold cheese sets into flecks that are troublesome to beat smooth.
- Sift the sugarConfectioners' sugar clumps in the box, and cream cheese frosting is too soft to break the clumps down. Sift before adding or the finished surface will be gritty.
- CoverageThe smaller quantity frosts the top of a single 8- or 9-inch layer or a small loaf. Double it for a two-layer cake or a 9x13 pan.
- Keeping itThis is a dairy frosting with no cooked stage, so the finished cake belongs in the refrigerator. Let it stand out 20 minutes before serving so the frosting softens again.
Tomato soup cake belongs to the depression-and-wartime tradition of spice cakes built from pantry stock, where condensed tomato soup supplied moisture, a faint acidity that worked with the soda, and a reddish-brown crumb. Recipes for it circulated in community and company cookbooks from roughly the 1930s onward and are often credited to soup-company promotional literature, though the attribution is traditional rather than firmly documented. The frosting here is a natural partner: cream cheese was sold in small foil-wrapped bricks and was cheap enough to beat into a sweet spread, and the writer's defensiveness about the whole idea shows that a cake made from soup still needed selling.