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Frosting (Beat whites of two eggs)
Beat whites of two eggs to a stiff froth, add gradually half pound best pulverized sugar, beat well for at least half an hour, flavor with lemon juice (and some add tartaric acid, as both whiten the icing). To color a delicate pink, use strawberry, currant or cranberry; or the grated peeling of an orange or lemon moistened with the juice and squeezed through a thin cloth, will color a handsome yellow. This amount will frost one large cake. -Mrs. W. W. W.
A hand-beaten royal icing from the era before electric mixers and before anyone worried about what lived inside a shell egg. The technique is sound; the raw egg is the problem.
- Why this one failsThe whites are never heated at any stage. A boiled or Swiss-meringue icing brings the whites to temperature over hot water; this one simply beats them stiff and spreads them on a cooled cake, where the frosting sits at room temperature for hours or days. Raw shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella, and children, older people and anyone pregnant or immunocompromised are the usual recipients of birthday cake. Use a current royal icing recipe formulated for pasteurized whites or meringue powder.
- The acid is not a preservativeLemon juice and tartaric acid are here purely for whiteness and for the sharpness they give the sugar. Neither acidifies the icing enough to make raw whites safe, and a nineteenth-century cook would not have expected them to.
- Pulverized sugarNineteenth-century pulverized sugar was loaf sugar ground fine, with no cornstarch in it. Half a pound is roughly two cups of modern confectioners' sugar, which behaves a little differently because of the added starch.
- Half an hour of beatingThis is a hand-beating figure, from the era before mechanical beaters. It reflects the labour of working coarse sugar into the whites rather than a requirement of the chemistry.
- The colouringsStrawberry, currant and cranberry juice were the household pinks; the strained zest-and-juice for yellow is essentially a home-made citrus extract. Both add liquid to the icing.
- YieldThe recipe claims enough for "one large cake," a period measure with no fixed modern equivalent.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) collected contributions from Ohio housewives, and the initials at the end are the book's usual credit to the woman who sent the recipe in. Frostings of this kind — whites, powdered sugar, an acid for whiteness — are close to what English cookery called royal icing, and they appear widely in American household books of the period. The colouring notes are worth attention: home tint came from fruit juice and citrus peel, and household palettes leaned heavily on pinks and pale yellows. The instruction to beat for half an hour is the honest measure of what a cake like this cost in labour.