Plain Icing
One cup sugar, 1/3 cup water. Boil until it hairs, pour on platters and cool 8 minutes, then beat until creamy. Set in bowl over teakettle to soften for use. Chocolate icing can be made by the same recipe, adding 1 ounce chocolate. Cherry icing is made by same recipe, adding 5 drops of cherry fruit coloring. 1/2 cup milk 1½ cup sugar
This is poured fondant rather than a buttercream: sugar syrup cooked to a set stage, cooled, then beaten until it turns opaque and creamy. Everything depends on the syrup temperature and on not stirring it while it boils.
- "Until it hairs"An old hand test for syrup that spins a fine thread off the spoon. In period usage the hair or thread stage sits a little below soft-ball, somewhere in the region of 230-240F on a modern thermometer. Undercooked and the icing will never set; much over and it turns grainy and hard.
- Do not stir while boilingCombine the sugar and water, stir only until the sugar is wet, then leave it alone. Wash stray crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush; a single crystal falling back in will seed the whole batch and give you sandy icing.
- "Pour on platters"This spreads the syrup thin so it cools fast and evenly, the same principle as a marble slab. Use large heatproof plates or a metal sheet pan, and do not scrape or disturb the syrup during the eight minutes.
- BeatingWork it with a stiff spatula or a wooden spoon, folding it in from the edges. It will stay clear for a minute or two, then go cloudy and stiffen suddenly into a white paste. A stand mixer with the paddle will do it in a few minutes.
- "Over teakettle"Meaning a bowl set over steam, i.e. an improvised double boiler. Warm it gently to pouring consistency; direct heat will make it dull and coarse.
- ChocolateAn ounce of chocolate here means unsweetened baking chocolate, one square in the old packaging. Melt it before adding so it blends rather than streaks.
- Cherry coloringPeriod "fruit colorings" were sold for tinting, and some carried a little flavor as well. A few drops of modern red food coloring gives the tint; add 1/4 teaspoon almond or cherry extract if you want the flavor too.
- The trailing line"1/2 cup milk, 1 1/2 cup sugar" appears with no instructions and looks like a stray fragment, possibly the opening of a neighboring recipe. It is not usable as written.
- YieldOne cup of sugar makes roughly a cup of icing, enough for about a single 8-inch layer; scale up for a filled two-layer cake.
Boiled sugar icings of this type are often said to have been a common cake finish in American household cookery before the rise of confectioners' sugar buttercreams, and the technique is simply small-scale fondant work borrowed from the candy kitchen: cook a syrup to the thread or soft-ball stage, cool it on a slab, then agitate it so it crystallizes fine and white. Cooks judged doneness by hand tests with names like "hairs," "threads" and "balls," and books of this era generally assumed the reader already knew what those words looked like. Titles like Reliable Recipes circulated widely in the early twentieth century, and such books were frequently, though not invariably, issued in connection with baking powder and other branded pantry goods; their icing sections could work in just this way: one base formula, with chocolate or a few drops of coloring turning it into a second and third recipe.