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Caramel Filling
2 eggs Vanilla Boil sugar and milk until it will harden when dropped into cold water. Beat yolks of eggs and whites separately and then combine them. Gradually pour the hot syrup over them, beating all the time. Add flavoring and beat until cool and quite thick.
This is an egg-and-syrup frosting built on the same principle as Italian meringue: a boiled sugar syrup is poured hot into beaten eggs and whipped until it sets. The sugar stage is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: syrup stage"Until it will harden when dropped into cold water" points to the hard-ball stage, roughly 250-265F if you check with a thermometer the original cook would not have had. Much under that and the filling stays loose; well over it and the syrup can set into threads as it hits the eggs.
- Boiling sugar with milkMilk solids scorch readily, so use a heavy pan, stir until the sugar dissolves, and expect the mixture to take on colour before it reaches temperature. That browning is where the caramel flavour comes from.
- Pour thin and slowAdd the syrup in a fine stream down the side of the bowl with the beater running. Dumping it in cooks the yolks into visible threads.
- Beating whites and yolks apartSeparating them probably helped get more volume by hand; with a stand mixer you can beat the whole eggs together to the ribbon stage and lose very little.
- Egg safetyThe hot syrup raises the egg temperature but does not reliably hold it long enough to pasteurise. If the filling is going on an uncooked cake and will sit at room temperature, use pasteurised eggs.
- Beat until genuinely cool"Beat until cool and quite thick" means several minutes past the point where it looks ready. Warm filling slumps off the sides of a layer cake.
- FlavouringVanilla goes in after the mixture has cooled somewhat, or the alcohol carries the aroma off with the steam.
"Caramel" in American cookbooks of this period rarely meant sugar cooked dark and dry; it usually meant sugar boiled with milk or cream until it browned and tasted of butterscotch, the same family as penuche and old-fashioned caramel icing. Community and company cookbooks with titles like Reliable Recipes were often issued by flour, baking powder or stove manufacturers, and they leaned on the candy thermometer's predecessor: the cold-water test, in which a drop of syrup is judged by whether it threads, balls up soft, balls up hard, or cracks. Pouring that syrup over beaten eggs was the standard trick for a filling that would hold its shape without gelatin or shortening, a method broadly related to what is done in Italian meringue buttercream today.