Home › Directions for Frosting › Frosting Without Eggs
Frosting Without Eggs
To one heaping tea-spoon Poland starch and just enough cold water to dissolve it, add a little hot water and cook in a basin set in hot water till very thick (or cook in a crock; either will prevent its burning or becoming lumpy). Should the sugar be lumpy roll it thoroughly, and stir in two and two-thirds cups while the starch is hot; flavor to taste, and spread on while the cake is a little warm. This should be made the day before using, as it takes longer to harden than when made with eggs, but it will never crumble in cutting. This is excellent. - Mrs. Ola Kellogg Wilcox.
An eggless boiled-starch icing that sets firm without cracking, from a period when powdered sugar arrived lumpy and had to be crushed at home. It works, but the proportions assume you understand it is a paste, not a pourable glaze.
- Poland starchA proprietary nineteenth-century starch, sold for both laundry and kitchen use; the surviving references do not settle who made it or whether it was potato or corn starch. Potato starch is still sold and behaves much the same way; cornstarch is a workable substitute, though it sets slightly softer and tastes chalky if undercooked.
- QuantitiesOne heaping teaspoon of starch to two and two-thirds cups of sugar. The sugar means powdered or finely crushed sugar, not granulated — granulated will not dissolve in the small amount of liquid and gives a gritty frosting.
- "Roll it thoroughly"Nineteenth-century powdered sugar caked in the barrel and was broken up with a rolling pin on a board or inside a cloth. Modern confectioners' sugar contains anti-caking starch; sift it instead.
- Basin set in hot waterA water bath. Set the basin down in hot water, as directed, and cook the starch paste until it turns thick and translucent with no raw starch flavor -- a minute or two past the point where it first stiffens.
- The hingeThe sugar goes in while the starch is still hot; a cooled paste is much harder to work smooth, which is why the recipe is specific about the timing.
- SpreadingOnto a barely warm cake, working fast with an offset spatula; the mixture is stiff and stops moving as it cools. Warm the spatula in hot water if it drags.
- TimingThe overnight rest is genuine advice, not caution: the recipe says outright that it takes longer to harden than an egg frosting, so it stays tacky for hours and only reaches its clean-cutting stage the next day.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two and two-thirds cups of sugar makes a generous quantity of stiff paste for a single cake.
Eggless frostings mattered in a household economy where eggs were seasonal and expensive -- hens laid little in winter, and a cake already claiming six or eight eggs left none for the icing. Starch icings filled the gap, and the recipe claims a practical advantage of its own: that it "will never crumble in cutting." Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions) prints dozens of such signed recipes, and the closing verdict -- "This is excellent" -- reads as the voice of the contributor rather than the editors.