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Chocolate Fudge Frosting
1½ tablespoons butter 1¼ cups confectioners' sugar ⅓ cup unsweetened powdered cocoa Few grains salt 1/4 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Melt butter, add cocoa, sugar, salt, and milk. Heat to boiling-point, and boil about eight minutes. Remove from fire and beat until creamy. Add vanilla and pour over cake.
A boiled fudge frosting: the sugar is cooked to soft-ball stage, then beaten until it loses its gloss. The whole thing hinges on catching it at the right moment, since it sets in the bowl if you dawdle.
- Quantities checkedThe sugar and cocoa measures were checked against the printed page and read as our text now gives them: 1¼ cups confectioners' sugar and ⅓ cup cocoa. The mixture is stiff at first but loosens as it heats; beat it hard off the fire so it pours smoothly.
- What eight minutes of boiling meansFannie Farmer's readers were cooking to a stage, not a clock. A steady eight-minute boil in a heavy saucepan should bring this somewhere near the soft-ball stage (roughly 234-240F), though the time will vary a good deal with pan and burner. Use a thermometer; eight minutes over a modern high-output burner in a thin pan may overshoot and give you something closer to candy than frosting.
- "Remove from fire"Simply off the heat. Let the pan stand a couple of minutes before beating — beating at full temperature makes a grainy frosting, because the sugar crystals form too coarse.
- Beating and the working windowBeat by hand with a wooden spoon or on medium with a mixer until the gloss dulls and it thickens, a few minutes. Once it dulls it stiffens quickly, so have the cake out and ready before you start.
- If it sets in the panBeat in a teaspoon of hot milk at a time until it flows again. This is normal with boiled frostings and is not a failure.
- Confectioners' sugar herePeriod confectioners' sugar was a finely ground sugar and would not have contained the cornstarch found in modern powdered sugar, which came later. Either works in a boiled frosting, since it all dissolves.
- YieldEnough to cover the top and sides of one 8-inch layer, or the top of a small loaf or sheet cake. Double it for a two-layer cake.
Boiled frostings of this type belong to the era when a cook's control over sugar came from her eyes and fingers rather than a dial. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) is remembered chiefly for insisting on level measurements, but the frosting chapter still leans on judgment: several of its recipes tell you to boil for a stated number of minutes and then beat until "creamy," which is a texture cue, not a measurement. Cocoa powder was newly cheap and reliable in American kitchens by the 1890s, developed by van Houten in 1828, and large domestic producers had turned chocolate from a drink into a baking ingredient — and fudge itself was then a young American sweet, generally traced to women's colleges in the Northeast in the 1880s and 1890s. A frosting called "fudge" is that candy craze migrating onto the top of a cake.