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Apple Frosting
Boil one cupful of sugar until it hairs; stir in whites of two eggs well beaten; add a pinch of salt and a pinch of cream tartar. Grate apple and put in after frosting is partly cool.
A boiled meringue frosting — what later books call seven-minute or Italian frosting — flavored with raw grated apple. The two things the original leaves out are the water for the syrup and any indication of quantity.
- The syrup needs waterA cupful of sugar boiled dry will caramelize, not thread. Boiled frostings of this period generally used somewhere between a quarter and a half cup of water per cup of sugar; a quarter cup is a safe starting point. Dissolve the sugar over low heat, then boil without stirring.
- "Until it hairs"The thread stage, 230–235°F on a candy thermometer: a spoon lifted from the syrup trails a fine hair. Modern boiled frostings usually go a little further, to 238–240°F (soft ball), which sets more reliably.
- Pour, don't stir inThe instruction to "stir in" the whites is the one place to depart from the text. Beat the whites to soft peaks first, then pour the hot syrup in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl while beating continuously. Dumping whites into hot syrup scrambles them.
- Cream of tartarA pinch stabilizes the foam and helps keep the syrup from crystallizing. Add it to the whites rather than the syrup at this stage, or add it to the syrup at the start; sprinkled over hot syrup at the end it does little.
- The appleGrate a tart apple fine on the small holes of a box grater and fold it in only when the frosting is barely warm, as directed — hot frosting will weep from the fruit's juice. Grated apple browns fast, so grate it at the last moment; a few drops of lemon juice help.
- KeepingThe apple makes this a same-day frosting. It softens and separates within hours and the raw fruit will not hold overnight at room temperature.
- YieldRoughly two to three cups of finished frosting, enough to cover the top and sides of a single 8- or 9-inch cake; the original gives no yield.
- Raw whitesThe whites are cooked only by the heat of the syrup, which is not a guaranteed pasteurization. Use pasteurized egg whites if serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg.
Boiled frostings spread through American cookbooks in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as cheap refined granulated sugar and rotary wire egg beaters became widely available; before that, icings were mostly unheated pastes of sifted sugar and egg white, which recipes often direct to be beaten by hand for a very long time. The candy-maker's vocabulary came with them, and books of this era routinely direct the cook to boil syrup "until it hairs" or "threads" -- a test of the eye rather than a thermometer, which was not yet standard kitchen equipment. Fruit-flavored variants like this one belong to a family of period frostings that carried a raw ingredient into the meringue at the last minute: grated apple, orange or lemon juice and rind, mashed banana, chopped raisins.