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Frosting
1 square chocolate
8 tablespoons confectioners'
3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon water
½ tablespoon vanilla
1 egg-white
Cook the chocolate, sugar and water together, stirring until the mixture is smooth and glossy. Beat the white of the egg enough to thin it, but not to make it frothy; add the sugar, stir until smooth and light, then add the chocolate mixture and vanillav Cool before spreading on the cake.
A boiled-sugar chocolate icing of a very common early twentieth-century type, but the egg white here never reaches a safe temperature and the ingredient list has been mangled in setting.
- Why the cautionThe chocolate, sugar and water are cooked, but they are stirred into an uncooked egg white and then cooled before spreading. A tablespoon of hot syrup thinned into a raw white does not carry enough heat to pasteurise it, and the frosting is then left to sit at room temperature on a cake. Salmonella risk in uncooked shell eggs is the reason this style of icing has largely disappeared from modern books; use a current recipe for chocolate frosting.
- The garbled ingredient listThe two sugar lines are a typesetting collision. The intent is almost certainly 8 tablespoons of confectioners' sugar for the egg white and 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar cooked with the chocolate and water, but the original as printed cannot be read with confidence.
- A square of chocolateOne ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. Butterick-era books assume the plain bitter cake chocolate sold in scored one-ounce squares; a modern 70% bar is not a substitute, since it already carries sugar and extra cocoa butter.
- Confectioners' sugar then and nowPeriod confectioners' sugar was often more coarsely ground than today's 10X, and did not always contain cornstarch. Modern powdered sugar typically carries about 3 percent starch, which may thicken the frosting slightly more than the original would have.
- "Smooth and glossy"The wording suggests the chocolate, sugar and water are melted together over low heat rather than boiled to a thread. One tablespoon of water against an ounce of chocolate and three tablespoons of sugar is not much liquid, and the mixture can stiffen or grain if it is overheated.
- YieldRoughly enough to cover the top of a single eight-inch layer, or to fill and thinly top two small layers. It is a thin spreading icing, not a piping frosting.
Uncooked frostings built on a raw white and confectioners' sugar were a common home icing through the nineteenth century, and a little cooked chocolate syrup, as here, added gloss and body without recourse to a candy thermometer. The Butterick books were published by the pattern company as part of a broader household-advice line aimed at the same middle-class readers who bought its dress patterns, and the frosting recipes are short and use ordinary pantry quantities. The safer descendants of this icing, the Italian and Swiss meringue buttercreams that heat the whites properly, were known to professional confectioners by this period, though they appear only rarely in domestic manuals of the time.