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Green Icing
Take a handful of young spinach-leaves, wash them thoroughly, and put them, while wet, into a mortar, and bruise them until the juice can be squeezed out. Whisk the white of a fresh egg to a firm froth; add, gradually, a quarter of a pound of sifted loaf sugar, and the juice of half a lemon, with as much of the spinach-juice as will colour the icing sufficiently. Beat it well, one way, for half an hour, and add a little more sugar, if necessary. Spread it smoothly, and dry in a cool oven. Probable cost, 3d.
This is a royal icing tinted with spinach juice — the standard Victorian way of getting green onto a cake before commercial food colours. The problem is not the spinach but the egg.
- The raw egg whiteThe white is whisked raw and never heated: a cool oven set only to dry the surface will not bring the icing anywhere near a temperature that kills Salmonella, and the interior stays raw indefinitely. An iced cake then sits at room temperature for days. Use a current royal icing recipe built on pasteurised white or meringue powder instead.
- The spinach is raw tooLeaves are bruised wet in a mortar and the expressed juice goes straight into the icing with no heating at all. Field-grown leaf crops are a documented vehicle for E. coli and Listeria, and a sugar-and-lemon icing is not acidic or dry enough to be reliably hostile to them.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard refined cone that the cook broke up, pounded and sifted; "sifted loaf sugar" is simply very fine white sugar, with none of the cornstarch that modern confectioners' sugar carries. A quarter of a pound is 4 oz.
- "Beat it well, one way, for half an hour"The one-direction instruction is folklore rather than physics, but the half hour is not: this is hand-beating with a fork or a bundle of twigs, doing what a stand mixer does in a few minutes. The aim is a smooth, dense, spreadable paste rather than a foam.
- "A cool oven"In a coal range this meant a slack, low oven, often the residual heat left after the day's baking. It is used here to dry the surface, not to cook. That is precisely why nothing in the icing is ever cooked.
- Probable cost, 3d.Three pence, the price for the whole quantity. Cassell's gives a "probable cost" for most entries so a household could budget.
Spinach "greening" was the standard vegetable colour of the English kitchen from the eighteenth century onwards, used for everything from green pea soup and herb sauces to almond paste and icings; cooks also pounded and strained it into a paste that could be kept for a few days. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later revision of the parent Dictionary of Cookery compiled in the 1870s, sits at the tail end of that tradition eing in commercial use, and the mid-Victorian food-adulteration scandals are often said to have made households wary of bought colouring, so a leaf from the garden was both cheaper and more trustworthy.