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Boiled Frosting
1/2 cup water 1 teaspoon vanilla, or Whites 2 eggs ½ tablespoon lemon juice Make same as White Mountain Cream. This frosting, on account of the larger quantity of egg, does not stiffen so quickly as White Mountain Cream, therefore is more successfully made by the inexperienced.
A boiled frosting is an Italian meringue: hot sugar syrup beaten into whipped egg whites. The entry here is written as a variation on White Mountain Cream, so the method sits in that earlier recipe.
- The sugar is not statedAs printed, the ingredient list gives water, egg whites, vanilla and lemon juice but no quantity of sugar. Standard proportions for this style are roughly one cup of sugar to a quarter cup of water; the printed half cup of water suggests a double batch, but the figure cannot be recovered from this page and should not be guessed at in the middle of cooking.
- Syrup stage is the hingeBoil the sugar and water without stirring until the syrup threads from the spoon, which is how the parent recipe would have judged it; on a thermometer that thread stage is about 230-235F, though many later boiled frostings are taken to soft ball, 238-242F. No temperature is given on this page. Under-cooked syrup gives a frosting that never sets; over-cooked syrup turns brittle and grainy on the cake.
- Pour thin and steadyAdd the hot syrup to the stiffly beaten whites in a slow stream down the side of the bowl while beating. Dumping it in cooks the whites into threads and lumps.
- Why the lemon juiceAcid boiled with a syrup inverts a little of the sucrose and discourages crystallising, the fault that makes a boiled frosting go sandy; whether that applies here depends on when the juice goes in, and in recipes of this type the lemon is usually beaten in at the end with the flavouring. In either case it cuts the flatness of a pure sugar-and-white icing.
- The two-egg noteThe extra white is genuinely useful. With more white to the same syrup the mixture is wetter and less concentrated in sugar, so, as the recipe says, it does not stiffen as quickly as the single-white version and stays workable under the spatula longer.
- Beat until it holdsContinue beating after the syrup is in, five to ten minutes, until the bowl is only warm and the meringue holds a peak that folds over slightly at the tip. Spread at once; it firms as it cools and forms a thin crust within the hour.
- Weather mattersOn a humid day the frosting will stay tacky and may weep. Cook the syrup two degrees higher in damp weather rather than trying to beat it into submission.
- YieldTwo whites and a syrup on this scale would ordinarily fill and cover a two-layer eight- or nine-inch cake, but with the sugar quantity missing from the page the yield cannot be fixed from the text.
History: Boiled frostings belong to the era before electric mixers, when the way to get a glossy white finish on a cake was to cook a syrup and beat it by hand into egg whites. The entry is written as a variation on an earlier White Mountain Cream, which the page treats as the parent recipe; the difference in egg is what the text itself points to, though the page gives no basis for saying that is the only difference, and the water quantity here may well differ too. The name White Mountain is often explained by the snow-capped look of the peaked frosting, but this is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one, and a connection to the White Mountains cannot be ruled out. The closing remark that the recipe is "more successfully made by the inexperienced" reads like the mark of a teaching cookbook, though it is a single remark rather than evidence of a settled editorial practice.