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Frosting Without Eggs
Add to four tablespoons of powdered sugar a scant tablespoon of water or milk, stir well, and use, adding a little more sugar if the frosting is not thick enough. For a chocolate frosting, proceed as above, and add one-half square of chocolate that has first been placed in a cup and thoroughly melted over steam.
A plain water icing, given in the smallest possible quantity. The proportions in the original run wet by modern standards, so treat the sugar figure as a starting point rather than a formula.
- The ratio is the whole recipeA scant tablespoon of liquid to four tablespoons of sugar is likely to run thin. The recipe itself allows for "adding a little more sugar if the frosting is not thick enough," and you may need considerably more before it coats a spoon and holds a ribbon. Add the liquid to the sugar a little at a time, not the reverse.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1911"Powdered sugar" in this period -- Period American usage could distinguish powdered sugar (a finer granulated grade) from pulverized or confectioners' sugar, though the terms were often used interchangeably. Modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch, is what you want here; it dissolves without grittiness and sets to a matte shell.
- Four tablespoons is not muchA quarter cup of sugar makes only a small amount of glaze, enough for a few small cakes or cookies or the top of one small layer. Scale up as needed for an 8- or 9-inch cake.
- Half a square of chocolateA square meant 1 ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this is 1/2 ounce. It carries very little sweetness of its own; the sugar in the icing is doing all of that work.
- Melting over steamA cup set over hot water is a bain-marie. Keep the water below a boil and do not let a drop get into the chocolate, or it will seize into a grainy paste. Let it cool slightly before stirring into the sugar so the icing does not go thin and streaky.
- Milk versus waterWater gives a clearer, harder, glassier set. Milk gives an opaque, softer icing that tastes richer but will not keep as long at room temperature on a cut cake.
- SettingSpread while fluid on a completely cooled cake and leave it uncovered for 30 to 60 minutes. Warm cake melts the glaze straight into the crumb.
Eggless frostings appear in books of this period because the usual alternatives leaned on egg whites: boiled icing needed hot syrup beaten into the whites, and royal icing was little more than whites and sugar beaten stiff. Eggs were seasonal and priced accordingly, and a cook who had used her whites in a cake, or had none to spare, still wanted something to put on top. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came out of a pattern-and-magazine publisher whose audience was the practical home housekeeper rather than the professional confectioner, which may account for a recipe like this one, measured in tablespoons and made in a cup.