Home › Directions for Frosting › Almond Frosting
Almond Frosting
Blanch half pint sweet almonds by putting them in boiling water, stripping off the skins, and spreading upon a dry cloth until cold; pound a few of them at a time in a mortar till well pulverized; mix carefully whites of three eggs and three-quarters pint powdered sugar, add almonds, flavor with a tea-spoon vanilla or lemon, and dry in a cool oven or in the open air when weather is pleasant.
This is an uncooked meringue icing: raw egg white, sugar and ground almonds, set by drying rather than by heat. The units and vessels are easy enough to translate, but the method itself is the problem.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are never brought anywhere near a safe temperature. A "cool oven" and open-air drying in pleasant weather both leave the egg protein in the range where Salmonella survives, and the icing is eaten as-is. Use a current recipe built on pasteurised whites, meringue powder, or a cooked syrup method instead.
- Drying outdoorsHours at ambient temperature on a moist sugar-and-nut paste is an incubator, not a dehydrator. The almond meal adds oil, protein and moisture, which makes it a friendlier medium than plain royal icing would be.
- Half pint of almondsMeasured by volume, not weight: about 8 fl oz of whole blanched almonds, roughly 5 oz or 140 g. Three-quarters pint of powdered sugar is about 1 1/2 cups sifted, near 6 oz.
- BlanchingBoiling water for a minute loosens the skins, which slip off between finger and thumb. The almonds must be dried thoroughly before pounding or they smear rather than powder.
- The mortarPounding "a few at a time" is deliberate. Working small quantities keeps the nuts from packing and oiling into paste, which is what a food processor does within seconds. Blanched almond flour is the modern equivalent of what this step produces.
- A cool ovenThe recipe gives no temperature, and period books use the term loosely for a gentle heat, often little more than the residual warmth of a dying fire with the door ajar. It is a drying instruction, not a baking one, which is precisely why it offers no food-safety margin.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) groups its icings together in a short frosting section, and almond frosting sits there as the luxury option: sweet almonds were an imported grocery, generally sold whole and skin-on, so blanching and pounding them by hand was part of the cost of the dish. The technique is essentially old-fashioned marchpane logic applied as a coating rather than a paste, and it belongs to a long line of uncooked royal icings that were set by air-drying, since low, even oven heat was hard to hold in a wood or coal range. Egg-borne illness was not understood in these terms in the 1870s; many nineteenth-century household books treat fresh eggs from a known hen as simply safe, which is the one assumption a modern kitchen cannot borrow.