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Sugar Icings and Glazings, for Cakes, Etc
Take two pounds of icing sugar in a bowl. Throw in the whites of two, or if necessary three, eggs. The whites must not be whisked, but thrown in as they are. Beat the mixture well with a wooden spoon or fork. Add a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, a few drops at a time. When a smooth paste which will not run is produced, the icing is ready. It should be spread evenly over the cake (which has been already baked and allowed to cool) with hands which have been well wetted with cold water.
It may be coloured, if liked, with cochineal, etc. If it is wished to ornament the cake with an ice beading, put a little of the icing into a small piece of white paper twisted into the form of a white sugar-bag. Squeeze this so that the sugar will come out through the hole at the bottom in a thin stream, and with this form any suitable devices on the cake. To impart to pastry a clear glaze which resembles barley-sugar, dip the surface of the pastry into liquid caramel (see SUGAR BOILING), or sift powdered and dry white sugar thickly upon it, and melt it by holding a salamander or red-hot shovel close to it. This glaze needs to be carefully preserved from damp. The icing must be dried in a cool oven.
This is royal icing in its Victorian form, bound with raw egg white and merely dried rather than cooked. The technique is sound; the egg handling is not.
- Why the cautionThe whites are never heated to a safe temperature. Drying in a cool oven sets a crust while the interior stays a raw egg-white gel, and the icing then sits at room temperature on the cake for days. Salmonella in shell eggs is the specific risk, and it is the reason later commercial and domestic practice moved to pasteurised whites or dried albumen. Use a current royal icing recipe.
- CochinealStill a legal food colour (carmine, E120), made from scale insects, and now declarable on labels because of allergy reports. The "etc." in the original would have covered a range of nineteenth-century dyes, several of them mineral-based and no longer permitted anywhere near food.
- The salamanderA thick iron plate on a long handle, heated red in the fire and held above a surface to brown or melt it. The red-hot shovel is the improvised version. A cook's blowtorch does the same job on sifted sugar, though the caramel-dip method described here gives the harder, clearer glaze.
- Two pounds of sugarThat is a very large batch by modern standards, enough to cover and decorate a full-size fruit cake with plenty over. The ratio matters more than the volume: roughly one white to a pound of icing sugar, adjusted until the paste holds a peak.
- Icing sugarThe same product as today's confectioners' sugar, though period sugar was often pounded and sifted at home and contained no anti-caking starch, so a modern packet may not behave identically.
- The paper coneThe "sugar-bag" twisted from white paper is a piping bag, the simplest domestic form of a tool that confectioners also used in cloth-and-nozzle versions. Greaseproof paper works the same way.
- Keeping the caramel glazeThe warning about damp is accurate. A caramel or melted-sugar glaze draws moisture from the air within hours and goes tacky, so it is finished as close to serving as possible and never covered while warm.
Cassell's is describing what English confectioners had by then settled on calling royal icing, a name generally traced to its use on grand ceremonial cakes and, in the usual telling, to the wedding cake of Queen Victoria in 1840. The method itself is older than the name: sugar beaten with egg white and sharpened with lemon juice appears in eighteenth-century English cookery books, though those recipes vary in their handling of the whites, many of them calling for the whites to be beaten. That the whites must go in unbeaten is the point of the instruction: beating gives a bubbled, porous surface rather than the dense, flat sheet that dries hard and takes ornament cleanly. The second half of the entry, on caramel and salamander glazes for pastry, belongs to the confectioner's shop rather than the domestic kitchen, and its inclusion is typical of Cassell's habit of packing professional practice into a book aimed at households with a cook.