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Chocolate Frosting
Six rounded table-spoons grated chocolate, one and a half cups powdered sugar, whites of three eggs; beat the whites but very little (they must not become white), add the chocolate, stir it in; then pour in the sugar gradually, beating to mix it well.-In the Kitchen.
This is an uncooked meringue-style icing: raw egg white beaten with grated chocolate and sugar, spread on a cake and left to dry in the air. The technique is period-typical, and it is the reason the recipe cannot be recommended today.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in this frosting is cooked, and a cake cooled enough to ice will not bring the whites anywhere near a temperature that kills Salmonella. Shell eggs are a recognised source of it, and an icing left to sit at room temperature on a cake for hours does nothing to reduce the risk. Use a current recipe for chocolate icing instead.
- Left to set at room temperatureThe recipe gives no setting instructions, but an uncooked egg-white icing of this kind is spread and left to dry in the air rather than heated. Whatever the holding time, an uncooked egg preparation held at room temperature is the condition that creates the risk.
- "Grated chocolate" is not cocoa powderIn this period the term meant a cake of plain unsweetened chocolate, grated. Six rounded tablespoons of gratings is roughly 1.5 to 2 oz of solid chocolate, not an equal volume of cocoa powder, which is far lighter and much more absorbent.
- "Beat but very little"The instruction that the whites must not become white is deliberate: the whites are loosened, not whipped to a foam, before the chocolate and sugar go in.
- Powdered sugar of the periodNineteenth-century powdered sugar was loaf sugar pounded and sifted, without the cornstarch that modern confectioners' sugar carries. Substituting the modern product changes both the set and the sweetness slightly.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio and first published in the 1870s, gathered its contents from contributing housekeepers and from other printed books, and credits them at the end of each receipt; "In the Kitchen" is a printed source of this kind rather than a place. Frostings of the period divide between boiled icings, where sugar syrup is cooked to a thread and beaten into egg white, and plain uncooked ones like this, which were quicker and needed no thermometer or steady fire. Chocolate was still commonly sold as a hard unsweetened cake for grating, much of it bought for drinking. Uncooked egg-white icings gave way over the following century to boiled, buttercream and ganache methods.