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Boiled Frosting or White Mountain Cream
1 cup sugar cup water Whites of 1 or 2 eggs 1 teaspoon flavoring Cook sugar and water together in a saucepan, stirring until sugar is dissolved. If 1 beaten egg is used, boil the sugar solution to the soft-ball stage, until it forms 2-inch threads when dropped from a spoon or fork. If 2 egg whites are used, boil to the firm ball stage. The syrup should not be stirred during the process of cooking. If crystals collect on the sides of the saucepan, remove with a wet cloth or wet brush. When the sugar solution has boiled to the right temperature pour it gradually into the stiffly-beaten whites of eggs beating continually while pouring and continue beating until of right consistency to spread on the cakes. Flavor.
A plain Italian meringue under an older name. The recipe as printed has one dropped measurement and one confused description of the syrup stages, both worth sorting out before you start.
- The missing water quantityThe line reads "1 cup sugar cup water" — a fraction has been lost in typesetting. Boiled frostings of this period normally use 1/3 to 1/2 cup water to 1 cup sugar; the exact figure does not much matter, since the water boils off and the finish is judged by temperature.
- Syrup temperaturesSoft-ball stage is about 235-240F; firm ball is usually given as about 242-250F. A candy thermometer removes much of the guesswork; the "2-inch threads" test in the original is a rough thread reading and is the least reliable part of the instructions.
- One white or twoWith one white use the lower temperature, with two the higher. More white needs a stiffer, more concentrated syrup to set it, which is why the two figures differ.
- Do not stirThis is the hinge. Once the sugar has dissolved, stop stirring entirely — agitation seeds crystallisation and gives a grainy frosting. Washing the pan sides with a wet brush, as directed, dissolves the crystals that would otherwise fall back in and start the same chain reaction.
- Pour in a thin streamAdd the syrup to whites already beaten stiff, in a slow steady stream down the side of the bowl and away from the beaters, with the mixer running. Dumped in at once, hot syrup cooks the whites into threads.
- When to stop beatingBeat until the bowl is no longer hot and the meringue holds a peak that just bends at the tip — usually 5 to 7 minutes with a stand mixer. Overbeaten, it turns matte and tears rather than spreading.
- FlavoringVanilla is the usual choice for the teaspoon of flavoring; add it at the end, once the meringue is beaten. Almond and lemon extracts also turn up in frostings of this period.
- YieldRoughly 2 cups, enough to fill and frost an 8- or 9-inch two-layer cake thinly, or to top a single sheet. Best spread the day it is made, as it crusts on standing and does not rebeat well.
"White Mountain cream" or "White Mountain frosting" was a stock American name through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a boiled meringue icing; the name is often explained by the snowy peaks the frosting forms, but that reading is traditional rather than documented. It appears in cookbooks alongside "boiled frosting" and "seven-minute frosting", which is the same idea worked over a double boiler instead of with a pre-cooked syrup. Its popularity is usually linked to cheap refined white sugar and, later, to the domestic egg beater, since whipping whites stiff by hand was a serious undertaking. That this entry gives stages rather than degrees is consistent with a period when the candy thermometer was known but not yet standard equipment in the home kitchen, and cooks were still trained to read syrup by how it behaved off a spoon.