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Filling
White of 1 egg, 1/2 teaspoonful of vanilla, 1/2 tablespoonful of cold water; add sugar until thick enough to spread. Spread on top of each layer; melt a quarter of a cake of chocolate over steam and spread on top of white frosting on each layer, after the white frosting has become hard.
A two-layer icing of the sort common before packaged frostings: a raw uncooked white icing set hard, then sealed with melted chocolate. The method is sound, but the base is uncooked egg white and never reaches any temperature at all.
- Why it fails todayThe white icing is raw egg white beaten with sugar and spread on a finished cake. Nothing in the process heats it, and the sugar concentration in a spreadable icing is not high enough to be relied on as a preservative. Salmonella on or in a shell egg survives this entirely, and the cake then sits at room temperature while the frosting hardens.
- The chocolate layer is not a sealChocolate melted over steam and spread on top looks like a barrier but does nothing to the icing underneath. It only keeps the raw layer moist and slows drying.
- If you want this effectUse a current recipe built on pasteurized egg whites, meringue powder, or a cooked meringue in which the whites are brought to temperature with hot syrup. Those give the same hard white layer under chocolate.
- "A quarter of a cake of chocolate"Baking chocolate of the period was sold in blocks of varying size, so a quarter-cake could mean anything from about 1 to 2 oz depending on the brand the book assumed. The instruction is genuinely imprecise.
- "Over steam"A double boiler, or a bowl set over barely simmering water, which keeps the chocolate off direct heat so it does not scorch. Note that chocolate can seize if water or condensed steam gets into it, so the bowl should be kept dry.
- No sugar quantity given"Add sugar until thick enough to spread" is the whole measurement. For one egg white that lands somewhere near 1 1/2 to 2 cups of confectioners' sugar, but the recipe leaves it to the cook's eye.
Uncooked icings of egg white beaten with powdered sugar appear throughout nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century household cookery, when the alternative was a boiled sugar syrup that demanded a thermometer or a practiced hand at the cold-water test. The raw version cost nothing but a whisked white and set hard in a few hours on a dry day. Finishing it with a thin coat of melted chocolate gave the dark top of an elaborate confection without the labour of a poured fondant; letting the white layer harden first, as the recipe insists, keeps the two from marbling into each other. Recipes of this kind often arrive with no yield, no sugar weight and no indication of which cake they were meant for.