Lemon Icing
Juice of 1/2 lemon, 1 cup confectioners' sugar and milk to mix to the consistency to spread. 1 cup powdered sugar 1 teaspoon cocoa 2 tablespoons butter
A one-line uncooked glaze, of the kind that filled the back pages of turn-of-the-century baking pamphlets. Note that the entry as printed has run two icings together: the lemon icing ends at "consistency to spread," and the three ingredients that follow belong to a separate chocolate icing whose method was lost in typesetting.
- Which half is the lemon icingUse only the first sentence: lemon juice, 1 cup confectioners' sugar, milk to loosen. The powdered sugar, cocoa and butter are a second, incomplete recipe and should not be added to it.
- Confectioners' and powdered sugarThe two names were often, though not always, used loosely for finely ground sugar, which may be why both appear in one entry; in some usage 'powdered' meant a coarser grind. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which is likely to thicken the glaze slightly more than the sugar a 1900 cook reached for.
- How much juiceHalf a lemon is anywhere from 1 to 2 tablespoons. Start with 1 tablespoon against the cup of sugar, then add milk a few drops at a time; the sugar can absorb very little liquid before it goes from stiff to runny.
- Milk or more juiceMilk gives an opaque, slightly softer set. Water or additional lemon juice both work and give a sharper, more translucent glaze; the choice affects flavour more than behaviour.
- Consistency to spreadAim for the texture of thick house paint: it should fall from the spoon in a ribbon that sinks back into the surface within a few seconds. Thinner than that and it will run off the sides of the cake.
- YieldOne cup of sugar makes enough to glaze the top of a single 8- or 9-inch layer, a loaf cake, or roughly a dozen small cakes. Double it if you want to cover sides as well.
- Setting and storageLeft uncovered at room temperature the surface crusts in about an hour but stays soft underneath. It does not set hard enough to stack or wrap cakes tightly.
Uncooked sugar glazes like this one appear to have spread through American home baking in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the availability of cheap, reliably milled fine sugar is often said to be what made them practical; before that, icing usually meant egg white beaten with sugar, or a boiled syrup that had to be judged by eye and thread. A glaze needing no eggs, no thermometer and no cooking at all suited the plain layer cakes and loaf cakes that community and company cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s were built around. The compression here — an entire icing given as a single sentence, with a neighbouring recipe collapsed into it — is characteristic of these volumes, and suggests the kind of quick assembly often associated with them, on the assumption that any reader would already know what to do with a bowl of sugar and a spoon.