No. 102

Icing with Syrup for Cakes Flavored with Vanilla, Orange, Lemon or Fruit Juices

Glace au Sirop pour Gateaux Parfumee soit a la Vanille, a l'Orange, au Citron ou au Jus de Fruits

Put one pint of water and a pound of sugar in a saucepan, adding half a vanilla bean or else some orange or lemon peel; stand it on the fire, let boil up a few times to obtain a syrup, then remove the saucepan from the range immediately, suppress the vanilla or peels and incorporate sufficient sugar to form a very smooth flowing paste.

For Uncooked Fruit Juice Icing.—Prepare it with strawberry, raspberry, currant or pineapple juice. Simply crush the ripe, fresh fruits, pour them on a sieve to collect all the liquid. Put some icing sugar in a vessel, dissolve it with a little thirty-degree syrup, and the fruit juice, incorporating the liquid slowly; just before using this icing warm it in an untinned copper vessel, stirring it during the operation. The icing sugars are colored according to taste and are used for icing Genoeses, pouring it over or else dipping in all kinds of small cakes, such as eclairs, etc.

← No. 101 Royal Icing, and Royal Icing Flavored with Z Elementary Methods No. 103 To Prepare, Clarify and Filter Aspic Jelly →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is two icings in one entry: a cooked sugar-syrup glaze flavored with vanilla or citrus, and an uncooked fruit-juice version. Both are thinned-sugar coatings of the type now called water icing or glace icing, and both live or die on consistency.

The hinge: judge by flow, not by measurementRanhofer gives no quantity for the sugar stirred in at the end because the syrup's concentration decides it. Add sifted confectioners' sugar to the hot syrup a few spoonfuls at a time until it ribbons thickly off the spoon and closes over itself in a second or two. Too thin and it soaks into the cake; too thick and it sets in ridges.
UnitsA pint is 2 cups (16 fl oz); a pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups granulated. That ratio boiled briefly gives a light syrup, not a thread or soft ball stage — "let boil up a few times" means a minute or two at a full boil, no more.
Thirty-degree syrupA reading on the Baumé hydrometer, a common tool of the nineteenth-century pastry kitchen. Thirty degrees Baumé is a sugar solution of roughly 55 percent sugar by weight — in practice about 5 parts sugar to 4 parts water by weight, boiled to dissolve and cooled. Ranhofer refers to a syrup of this density elsewhere in the book as a stock item.
Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Modern versions contain cornstarch, which makes the icing slightly cloudier and a little more prone to setting matte than the pure pulverized sugar Ranhofer used. Sift it; lumps will not dissolve in a cool liquid.
"Suppress the vanilla or peels"A literal rendering of the French supprimer — simply lift them out and discard. The half bean and the citrus peel are steeped, not left in.
Untinned copperBare copper was prized for even, fast heating, but it reacts with acidic fruit juice and can leach copper into the icing. Warm the fruit icing in stainless steel or over a bowl of hot water instead, and only to about 100°F — hot enough to loosen it, cool enough that it does not turn grainy or dull.
The fruit-juice versionStrain the crushed fruit through a fine sieve rather than pressing hard; pulp specks show badly on a glazed surface.
Genoese and small cakesGénoise, the whisked whole-egg sponge. Pour the icing over a cooled cake on a rack and spread once with an offset spatula, or dip the tops of éclairs and set them upright to drain. Working the icing repeatedly breaks its gloss.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of his long service as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" section is where he lays down the building blocks the rest of the book assumes you already know — stocks, forcemeats, syrups, icings. It is placed immediately after royal icing, the two between them covering much of the finishing work: royal for piping and hard white coatings, syrup icing for the glossy poured surface of a génoise or an éclair. The reference to "thirty-degree syrup" reflects the period practice of gauging sugar by density with a hydrometer, keeping stock syrup at a fixed strength so that every recipe depending on it started from a known point.