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Chocolate Frosting
Add 1 square melted chocolate to White Mountain Cream. cup sugar cup flour
A one-line variation that depends entirely on a recipe printed elsewhere in the book. The trailing "cup sugar cup flour" is stray type from a neighbouring entry and has nothing to do with the frosting.
- One square of chocolateA square generally means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the usual moulded portion in American cookbooks of this period. Modern bars are often 1 oz per segment as well, but check the wrapper, since some are sold in 1/2 oz squares.
- What White Mountain Cream isIt is the boiled-icing family: a sugar syrup boiled until it threads and beaten in a thin stream into stiffly whipped egg whites until the mixture holds a peak and cools. Without that base recipe in front of you this line cannot be followed.
- Soft-ball stage, in numbersOld books say "until it threads" or "spins a thread," which on a thermometer is roughly 230-235F; the soft-ball stage proper is a little hotter, around 235-240F. Cooked too low the frosting stays soupy; much hotter and it sets hard before you can spread it.
- When to add the chocolateMelt it gently and let it cool to barely warm, then fold it in near the end of beating, once the meringue has body. Hot chocolate poured into a young meringue slackens it and the frosting weeps.
- Fat and glossChocolate adds cocoa butter, which softens the set of a boiled icing. Expect a frosting that stays glossy and slightly tacky rather than one that crusts firmly like plain White Mountain.
- Working timeBoiled icings set as they cool. Spread it while it is still warm and pourable; reheating or re-beating a set batch will not bring back the texture.
- YieldThe base recipe is not given here, but a typical White Mountain Cream on two egg whites frosts a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. The added ounce of chocolate should not change that meaningfully.
White Mountain Cream, sometimes printed as White Mountain Cake Frosting, was one of the standard American boiled icings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the name is usually taken to refer to its snowy peaks, though no documented origin survives. The technique -- hot syrup beaten into egg whites -- was widespread in household cookbooks, where the stage was judged by the thread test rather than by thermometer. A chocolate variation reduced to a single line depending on a recipe several pages away is characteristic of compressed cookbook formats, as is the stray "cup sugar cup flour," which appears to be a fragment of adjacent type.