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Marshmallow Frosting
Melt one cup white fondant; add the white of one egg beaten until stiff, and stir over the fire two minutes. Remove from range, and beat until of right consistency to spread. Flavor with one-fourth teaspoon water white vanilla. This is a most delicious frosting for chocolate cake, but will never spread perfectly smooth.
Ornamental Frosting I 2 cups suger 1 cup water Whites 3 eggs ¼ teaspoon tartaric acid Boil sugar and water until syrup when dropped from tip of spoon forms a long thread. Pour syrup gradually on beaten whites of eggs, beating constantly; then add acid and continue beating. When stiff enough to spread, put a thin coating over cake. Beat remaining frosting until cold and stiff enough to keep in shape after being forced through a pastry tube. After first coating on cake has hardened, cover with a thicker layer, and crease for cutting. If frosting is too stiff to spread smoothly, thin with a few drops of water. With a pastry bag and variety of tubes, cake may be ornamented as desired.
Whites 3 eggs
Two frostings have run together on this page: a quick marshmallow frosting built on melted fondant, and a boiled Italian-meringue "Ornamental Frosting" for piping. Both depend on sugar behaving correctly, so read them separately before starting.
- Fondant is the hingeThis recipe assumes you have a batch of cooked white fondant already made and ripened, as the book teaches elsewhere. Melt it gently over hot water, not on direct heat, and only until it is fluid; scorched or overheated fondant turns grainy and no amount of beating will bring it back.
- "Over the fire"Means over direct stovetop heat on a coal or wood range, where the cook controlled heat by moving the pan. Use low heat or a bowl over simmering water, and keep stirring for the full two minutes so the egg white sets into the sugar rather than cooking into threads.
- Water white vanillaA colorless vanilla extract, sold specifically so pale frostings and icings would not go beige. Clear imitation vanilla is the modern equivalent; ordinary dark extract works but will tint the frosting.
- The long thread stageThe book gives no temperature. On a modern candy thermometer the thread stages fall roughly in the 230-240F range, with a long thread at the upper end. Too cool and the meringue stays soupy; much hotter and the frosting sets hard before you can spread it.
- The tartaric acidThe printed page gives one-fourth teaspoon tartaric acid, as our text now reads. Tartaric acid is still sold for confectionery; an equal amount of cream of tartar is the usual household stand-in.
- Egg whitesBoth frostings heat the whites only briefly and to no measured temperature. Use pasteurized whites, sold in cartons, if the cake is for children, elderly guests or anyone pregnant.
- Work fast, then stopThe marshmallow frosting stiffens as it cools and, as the book admits, will never spread glass-smooth. Swirl it on and leave it; overworking a fondant frosting dulls the gloss and makes it crumbly at the edges.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. As a rough guide, one cup of fondant plus a white should cover a single 8- or 9-inch layer, and the ornamental frosting, from two cups of sugar and three whites, should be enough to coat and pipe a two-layer cake.
- Crease for cuttingThe recipe's direction to score the surface into wedges before it fully hardens suits a stiff boiled frosting, which otherwise shatters under the knife. Mark it while the second coat is still yielding.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes an entire chapter to fillings and frostings because a well-made cake was, in the 1890s, a household's most visible piece of skilled work, and the two recipes here mark the two poles of that skill: one frosting is a quick trick with fondant already in the pantry, the other is the professional confectioner's boiled meringue, piped through a pastry bag. The name "marshmallow" is a survival rather than a description; the original sweet was made from the mucilage of the marsh mallow root, Althaea officinalis, and by the late nineteenth century commercial makers had largely displaced the root in favour of gelatin, gum arabic and beaten egg white. What Farmer offers is the frosting equivalent of that same substitution: sugar and albumen doing the work the plant once did, and keeping only the texture and the name.