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White Glaze or Boiled Icing
1 pound of granulated sugar. 1/2 teacupful of water. 4 whites of eggs. Flavoring extracts.
Boil the sugar and water to a point thicker than for the yellow glaze, or till the drop in cold water sets hard and brittle. After the first mixing of the sugar and water these syrups should never be stirred--makes them turn to sugar. Don't beat the whites any more than enough to mix them. Pour the bubbling syrup to the whites, beating all the while. Set on the fire again and beat for a minute or two while it cooks. It is extremely liable to burn on the bottom.
Then set the saucepan in a pan of ice-water, and heat the icing with a Dover egg beater till it becomes thick. It will be of a dazzling whiteness at last. Can be flavored to suit the fancy. If boiled to right point sets hard as soon as spread or poured over the cake.
This is an Italian meringue taken to an unusually high sugar temperature so that it sets hard rather than staying fluffy. The hinge is the syrup: cook it too little and it never firms, stir it once it boils and the whole batch grains.
- The syrup temperature"Sets hard and brittle" in cold water is hard-crack, roughly 300-310F. Most modern boiled icings stop at soft ball, 238-245F, which gives a soft, spreadable frosting; this book deliberately goes higher to get a glaze that hardens on contact. Use a candy thermometer and decide which result you want before you start.
- Half a teacupfulPeriod teacups were not standardised and were commonly reckoned at somewhere around 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so this is genuinely ambiguous. Any amount that dissolves the sugar will do, since nearly all of it boils off at this temperature; something in the region of 1/2 cup water to 1 pound sugar works as a starting ratio.
- Never stirThe warning is not superstition. Once the syrup boils, agitation and stray crystals on the pan wall seed crystallisation and the syrup turns opaque and sandy. Wash the sides down with a wet brush or cover the pan for the first minute so condensation does the job.
- Sugar to whitesOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; four large whites are about 4 1/2 ounces. That is a very high sugar ratio, which is what makes the finished glaze brittle.
- Skip the return to the fireSetting the pan back on the heat is where the recipe says it is "extremely liable to burn," and it is. A thin stream of 300F syrup poured slowly into whites already beaten to soft peak in a stand mixer brings them well up in temperature on its own, though that is not a guaranteed pasteurisation; keep whipping until the bowl is no longer warm.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A stand mixer with the whisk attachment does the same work, and the ice-water bath still helps if you want to hurry the cooling.
- Work fast, and not on a wet dayAt this concentration the icing skins over quickly, so have the cake ready and pour or spread at once. High humidity makes a hard-set glaze go tacky within hours.
- YieldEnough to cover and fill a two-layer 9-inch cake generously, or to glaze two to three dozen small cakes.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century manuals written for men working hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than for home cooks, which is why the instructions read as workshop notes: what goes wrong, where it scorches, what not to touch. Boiled icing of this kind is the confectioner's Italian meringue, hot syrup beaten into whites, and it spread widely in American baking in the second half of the century as cheap refined granulated sugar became reliably available and cane sugar stopped being a luxury measured out by the ounce. The "Dover egg beater" named here was a rotary hand beater of the sort made by the Dover Stamping Company of Boston; the brand name appears so often in period recipes that it seems to have tended toward standing in for the tool itself, much as later cooks wrote "Frigidaire" for any refrigerator. The distinction the recipe draws between white glaze and "the yellow glaze" is a professional one, and it points to a kitchen turning out finished cakes in quantity rather than one cake at a time.