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Caramel Filling
Two cupfuls brown sugar, one and one-half cupfuls of sweet milk, one tablespoonful butter. Boiling all together until thick like cream, but not hair.
A boiled brown-sugar frosting of the type used between cake layers. It is really a caramel fudge, and it behaves like one: the whole thing turns on how far you take the sugar.
- "Not hair"The old sugar-boiling scale ran from thread (or "hair") through soft ball to crack, tested by dropping syrup in cold water or pulling it from a spoon. The instruction is to stop short of the point where the syrup spins a thread off the spoon; cooked further it sets firm in the pan and becomes difficult to spread.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century books distinguish sweet milk from sour milk and buttermilk, which were used with saleratus for leavening. Sweet milk is simply fresh whole milk.
- The panMilk and sugar together scorch readily. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan considerably larger than seems necessary, since the mixture climbs as it boils, and stir more or less continuously.
- Cool before beatingThe recipe stops at "thick like cream," which is the state of the hot syrup, not of the finished filling. Let it cool to lukewarm undisturbed, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens to spreading consistency. Beating while hot gives a grainy result.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was less uniform than today's. Light brown gives a mild caramel flavour, dark brown a molasses-heavy one; either works.
- TimingExpect 15 to 25 minutes of boiling depending on pan width. Judge by temperature or the cold-water test rather than the clock.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of filling, enough for the layers and top of a standard two-layer cake.
- If it seizesAn over-beaten or over-cooked batch can be loosened with a spoonful of hot milk or cream worked in, which is the usual fudge remedy.
Boiled brown-sugar fillings like this one were the American answer to a butter icing at a time when much sweetening came as loaf, granulated or brown sugar that had to be cooked to the right stage by eye. The technique is closely related to that of penuche, the brown-sugar fudge of New England, though penuche is generally made with a different milk-to-sugar proportion and more butter. A filled layer cake of this kind was a company dish, and one whose success depended entirely on a cook's ability to read boiling sugar without a thermometer. The word "hair" in the last line belongs to that older vocabulary of sugar stages, which ran through thread, pearl, blow, feather, ball and crack before candy thermometers made the whole scale obsolete.