Recipe ID thread

Do you ever find a recipe of unknown provenance and wonder where it came from? Recipes get clipped, republished, stolen, written on index cards, modified beyond recognition, and published again, but sometimes a good cook will recognize the basic technique and definitively identify What This Is. Perhaps it has a standard name. This is the thread to talk about it. I’ll start, one from a yellowed index card in perfect Palmer penmanship:

MRS. HIRONAKA’S FROSTING
2 squares baker’s chocolate
1T butter
1 1/2 c powdered sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
8 oz. whipping cream

Melt chocolate with butter. Add powdered sugar. Beat in egg and vanilla. In separate bowl, whip cream to soft stage, then start adding chocolate mixture. Beat till stiff. I usually make a double recipe.

Comments: this is a weird recipe. Adding powdered sugar to melted chocolate and butter in these quantities (and actually, I only used half the sugar) resulted in extremely stiff crumbs, something that looked like it ought to be kneaded. Instead of doing that, I added the egg and vanilla and it became a very lumpy stiff liquid. Adding that to whipped cream made chocolatey whipped cream, very delicious but totally unlike normal cake frosting. More of a topping to be dolloped onto a slice of cake, which I happily did. Anybody know of anything like this?

Hironaka isn’t a highly uncommon surname, but here’s a recipe book (PDF) that doesn’t look like it includes yours, and does feature dessert by a Mrs. Hironaka.

Thank you. Mrs. Hironaka was my partner’s grandmother’s neighbor in Honolulu, actually, but I was more interested in stuff like, where might Mrs. Hironaka have gotten the recipe? Of course that’s likely unknowable, but what could be known is what sort of preparation this is from a culinary standpoint, if it’s anything.

One might class frostings/icings as ganaches, glazes, buttercreams, etc. Obviously this is a whipped cream frosting, but is this the standard way of flavoring whipped cream with chocolate (and what’s up with the raw egg?) I’d have thought to use cocoa powder (that’s how Betty Crocker does it), whereas Martha Stewart has you melt the chocolate into unwhipped cream, no egg, and chill overnight before whipping it all together. I think Mrs. Hironaka’s recipe allows for cooling the melted chocolate on purpose, because to add hot chocolate to whipped cream would deflate it. But this is just for example. I don’t care so much about this recipe as such, just wanted to talk about how techniques are developed and modified (and perhaps corrupted).

There’s a famous poached-meringue recipe called Floating Island (by some), that I’ve seen printed with other names including, once, Fluffy Duffy. But looking at the recipes, you can see what they’re doing, regardless of what they call it, if you’re familiar with the classic preparation. Just an example.