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Plain Frosting
Milk Lemon or vanilla Moisten sugar with enough sweet milk to make required consistency to spread easily. Care must be taken not to get it too thin.
A bare-bones milk icing of the sort printed as a fallback when no eggs were to be spared. The book gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are the working ratio cooks of the period assumed.
- What "sugar" means herePowdered or confectioners' sugar, not granulated. Granulated will not dissolve in cold milk and gives a gritty icing. Sift it first; lumps in the sugar become lumps on the cake.
- Working proportionsThe book gives none. As a starting point, roughly 2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar to 2 to 3 tablespoons milk. Add the milk a teaspoon at a time toward the end, since the last teaspoon is what turns a spreadable icing into a glaze.
- "Sweet milk"Nineteenth-century shorthand for fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk kept for quick breads. Any whole milk works; cream gives a slightly richer set.
- The instruction that mattersToo thin cannot be fixed by waiting. If it runs, beat in more sifted sugar a spoonful at a time rather than hoping it will stiffen on the cake, because this icing sets by drying, not by cooling.
- FlavouringThe listed lemon or vanilla means about 1/2 teaspoon extract, or the juice and grated zest of half a lemon. Lemon juice counts toward the liquid, so reduce the milk accordingly.
- SpreadingThe cake must be completely cool. Warm cake melts the icing off the sides and lifts crumbs into it. A thin first coat, left to dry ten minutes, then a second coat gives a clean surface.
- Setting and yieldAbout this quantity should cover the top and sides of one 8- or 9-inch layer, or the top of a sheet cake. It will form a dry crust in an hour or so at room temperature but stays soft underneath, and it does not hold up to stacking or wrapping.
Plain frosting is the household economy icing: no eggs, no butter, no boiling syrup and no thermometer, just sugar slackened with whatever liquid was at hand. Books of this period often print it alongside boiled frosting and a beaten white-of-egg icing, and the contrast is instructive, since the boiled version demanded a sugar syrup taken to the right thread and a steady arm, while this one could be stirred up in a cup while the cake cooled. The vagueness about quantities may reflect an assumption that the reader had made icing before and would judge by the look of it. Finely ground confectioners' sugar was available commercially by the late nineteenth century, and such sugars were commonly cut with a little starch to keep them from caking -- the sort of product that makes an uncooked icing like this practical.