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Vanilla Icing
White 1 large egg, 1 cup confectioner's sugar, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Put egg white in bowl and add gradually, while stirring constantly, sugar. Beat three minutes, add vanilla and spread thinly on cake.
A plain uncooked royal icing of the type standard in American cookbooks a century ago. The method is sound; the problem is that the egg white is eaten raw.
- Why the cautionNothing in this recipe brings the egg white above room temperature — there is no syrup poured in hot, no cooking over water, no baking afterward. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and within the white and yolk, and a thin layer of sugar icing left to dry on a cake does not kill it.
- Sugar is not a safeguardThe sugar in an icing like this, and the crust it forms as it dries, do not make it safe: Salmonella can survive in sweetened, low-moisture mixtures, and the icing sits at room temperature until the cake is served.
- Who is most at riskCakes iced this way are typically served to a whole table, including children, older guests and anyone pregnant or immune-compromised — precisely the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most serious. Use a current icing recipe instead.
- Confectioner's sugarBroadly the same product sold today as powdered or icing sugar, usually containing a little starch to keep it free-flowing.
- "Spread thinly"The instruction indicates a thin coat over the cake rather than a thick frosting to fill or pipe; the quantity given is small.
- Egg size"1 large egg" here does not correspond to the modern graded large egg; egg sizes were not standardised when this was written.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, published Choice Recipes as advertising for its chocolate and cocoa, and pamphlets like it padded out their chocolate formulas with the everyday cake, filling and icing recipes a housekeeper would need alongside them. Uncooked icings of egg white and sifted sugar — variously called royal icing or plain frosting — were the default finish for a home cake before commercial confectioners' shortening and stabilizers arrived, and the technique goes back at least to eighteenth-century English confectionery, where the same mixture is often said to have been beaten with a birch whisk and spread on rich fruit cakes. Vanilla as the flavoring marks the recipe as distinctly American; earlier books more often reach for rosewater or lemon.