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Minnesota Frosting
Beat whites of three eggs until frothy, not white, add one and a third pints powdered sugar gradually with one hand, beating briskly with the other. Flavor with a tea-spoon of vanilla. It is better not to beat the whites of the eggs until stiff before adding sugar, as it makes the icing very hard to dry. -Mrs. C. J., Winona, Minn.
This is an uncooked royal-style icing: raw egg white beaten with powdered sugar and left to air-dry on the cake. The notes below cover the measurements and the reason the method is no longer sound.
- Why it fails todayThe egg whites are never heated at any stage; the icing is dried, not cooked. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and sugar and air-drying do not reliably kill it. Use a current frosting recipe instead.
- The sugar measure"One and a third pints powdered sugar" is a volume measure, not a weight. A pint of powdered sugar is about two cups, so this is roughly 2 2/3 cups — about 10 to 11 oz, depending on whether it was sifted, which the recipe does not say.
- Powdered sugar then and nowNineteenth-century powdered sugar was loaf sugar crushed and sieved, sometimes at home, and was generally coarser than modern confectioners' sugar, which is milled fine and usually cut with cornstarch. The cornstarch is likely to affect how the icing sets and dries.
- The instruction the recipe is built aroundThe whole point of the note at the end is that the whites go in frothy, not stiff. Fully beaten whites make a stiff, meringue-like mass that skins over and stays tacky underneath — hence "very hard to dry." It is a sound observation about egg-white foams, whatever the safety problem.
- Drying, not bakingThere is no oven step at all: the icing is dried rather than baked, which is why nothing in the recipe reaches a safe temperature.
- YieldThree whites and that much sugar make roughly a cup and a half of icing, enough for a thin coat on one modest cake. The recipe states no yield.
History: Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (first published 1876, with widely circulated 1877 and later editions) was compiled from recipes contributed by readers and credited by initials and town, as here with "Mrs. C. J., Winona, Minn." The name presumably reflects the contributor's state rather than anything about the method. The book carries several icings, both uncooked and boiled. Uncooked white-and-sugar icings needed no thermometer, no syrup and no fuel; boiled icing, in which hot syrup is poured over beaten whites, became the more common form in later decades.