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White Mountain Cream
1 cup sugar 1/3 cup cold water White 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon vanilla or ½ tablespoon lemon juice Put sugar and water in saucepan, and stir to prevent sugar from adhering to saucepan; heat gradually to boilingpoint, and boil without stirring until syrup will thread when dropped from tip of spoon or tines of silver fork. Pour syrup gradually on beaten white of egg, beating mixture constantly, and continue beating until of right consistency to spread; then add flavoring and pour over cake, spreading evenly with back of spoon. Crease as soon as firm. If not beaten long enough, frosting will run; if beaten too long, it will not be smooth. Frosting beaten too long may be improved by adding a few drops of lemon juice or boiling water. This frosting is soft inside, and has a glossy surface. If frosting is to be ornamented with nuts or candied cherries, place them on frosting as soon as spread.
This is boiled frosting — an Italian meringue by another name — and the whole thing turns on the syrup being cooked to the right point before it meets the egg white.
- "Will thread" is a temperatureThe thread stage is 230-234F on a candy thermometer, when a drop falls from the spoon in a fine strand rather than a bead. Under that the frosting stays soupy; much over it and you are heading toward fudge.
- Do not stir once it boilsThe instruction to stir only at the start is deliberate. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup encourages crystallisation and a grainy frosting; wipe stray crystals off the pan side with a wet brush instead.
- Use a mixerBeat the white to soft peaks first, then pour the syrup in a thin stream down the side of the bowl with the machine running at medium. A stand mixer or hand mixer does in four or five minutes what the original assumed of a wire whisk and a strong arm.
- Egg sizeEggs of the period were generally smaller than a modern large egg, whose white runs to about 2 tablespoons, so one white here may give you less than a modern white would. If your frosting seems slack, that is a likely reason; a full cup of sugar syrup wants a generous single white at most.
- Egg safetySyrup at thread stage does not reliably bring the whites to a pasteurising temperature. Anyone cooking for small children, pregnant women or the immune-compromised should use pasteurised egg whites, sold in cartons.
- "Crease as soon as firm"This means scoring the top into serving wedges with a knife while the surface is still soft, so the crust does not shatter when the cake is cut later.
- HumidityBoiled frosting draws water from the air and will weep on a damp day. Make it in dry conditions if you can, and serve the cake the day it is frosted.
- YieldRoughly enough to cover the top and sides of one 8- or 9-inch cake, or the top of a sheet cake; the recipe itself gives no yield. Double it if you want a generously filled two-layer cake.
White Mountain frosting is generally said to take its name from the snow-capped New Hampshire peaks, and the same conceit is often credited with giving rise to White Mountain cake —a white layer cake wearing this icing. To get a smooth white coating on a cake you boiled a sugar syrup and beat it into egg white, which is exactly the technique a confectioner would use for meringue or marshmallow. Fannie Farmer's 1896 book gives a whole clutch of these boiled frostings, each a variation on the same syrup — with chocolate, with nuts, with coffee — and the fussy warnings here about beating too little or too long reflect that she was writing for cooks working by eye and spoon, without a thermometer.