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Chocolate Dressing for Cake
Mrs. S. McMaster.
One bar and a-half chocolate, five tablespoons sweet milk, four of powdered sugar; boil soft and thick; when cool add whites of two eggs and sugar to thicken.
A late nineteenth-century boiled chocolate icing, finished with uncooked egg white. The finishing step is the problem: the whites go into a mixture that has already cooled and are never heated again.
- Why the cautionThe two egg whites are beaten into a cooled base and the frosting is then spread on a finished cake, so the egg never reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. A cooked-sugar syrup poured hot over whipping whites is a different technique with a different safety profile; this is not that. Use a current cooked or pasteurised-white frosting recipe instead.
- "One bar and a-half chocolate"Household chocolate then came as pressed cakes or bars of unsweetened chocolate, in sizes that varied by maker. What Mrs. McMaster's bar weighed is genuinely unknown, and the ratio to five tablespoons of milk suggests something well short of a half-pound block.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk many kitchens also had on hand. Nothing sweetened about it.
- "Boil soft and thick"The first stage is a plain chocolate-milk-sugar paste cooked down on the stove. This part is sound cookery; the recipe only goes wrong at the addition of the raw whites.
- Powdered sugarPeriod powdered sugar generally meant loaf sugar crushed and sifted fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today, which behaves differently when boiled.
- YieldNo quantity is given, which is typical of the book. With the weight of the chocolate unknown, the finished quantity cannot be worked out from the proportions.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women and sold for charity, and it is generally cited as one of the earliest of the American community cookbooks — a form that would dominate church and hospital fundraising for the next century. The format explains the recipe's terseness: Mrs. S. McMaster was writing for neighbours who already knew what a bar of chocolate looked like and how long to boil a dressing. Chocolate icings only became common household fare in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this one pairs a cooked base with an uncooked meringue finish.