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Frosting for Cake
Ella Guild.
One cup frosting sugar, two tablespoons of water boiled together; take it off the stove and stir in the white of one egg beaten to a stiff froth; stir all together well; then frost your cake with it, and you will never want a nicer frosting than this.
A one-egg boiled icing, in the compressed style of a recipe passed between neighbours. The method is sound but the order of operations needs adjusting to get a meringue rather than sweet scrambled egg.
- Frosting sugarIn Canadian usage this is icing sugar, i.e. confectioners' or powdered sugar. One cup is roughly 120 g; with only two tablespoons of water it makes a very thick syrup.
- How far to boilWith only two tablespoons of water the syrup passes through thread stage within a minute or two. Take it to about 235-240F on a thermometer for an icing that sets firm; boil it longer and it will turn grainy in the bowl.
- Reverse the orderBeat the white stiff first, then pour the hot syrup into it in a thin stream while beating, rather than stirring the white into the pan. Adding a beaten white to a hot syrup off the heat, as written, tends to cook it into threads before it can aerate.
- Egg safetyThe syrup partially cooks the white but there is no guarantee the mixture holds a safe temperature. Use pasteurized whites if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young, or immune-compromised.
- Work fastThis is a setting icing. Spread it the moment it turns glossy and holds a peak; it skins over within minutes and cannot be smoothed once it has.
- YieldEnough to cover the top and sides of one 8-inch single layer, or the top of a loaf cake. Double it for a filled two-layer cake.
- HumiditySugar-and-white icings weep on damp days. On a humid afternoon boil the syrup a few degrees higher to compensate.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and is generally regarded as the first Canadian community cookbook of its kind. Its distinguishing habit is the signed contribution: Ella Guild's name sits above this frosting the way a name sits above a church-supper dish, and the closing boast that "you will never want a nicer frosting than this" is her voice, not an editor's. Boiled icings of this type spread through North American household books in the middle of the nineteenth century, a diffusion often credited to cheap refined sugar and the rotary egg beater, which are said to have made a stiff white froth a matter of minutes rather than an arm-aching quarter hour. The same technique, taken a step further with longer beating over hot water, is commonly seen as the ancestor of the seven-minute frosting of the next generation, and, with butter beaten in at the end, of the Italian meringue buttercream of the pastry kitchen.