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Apple Frosting
Add to an egg white one cup of confectioners' sugar and the grated pulp of two raw apples.
Flavor with vanilla.
This is an uncooked meringue-style icing built on a raw egg white, and that is the reason it cannot be recommended as printed. The notes below explain the problem and the period assumptions behind the wording.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in this frosting is cooked. Unlike a boiled or seven-minute icing, where a hot sugar syrup brings the whites up in temperature, the white here is simply beaten with sugar and fruit and spread on a cake. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and sugar alone does not inactivate it.
- The apple makes it worse, not betterGrated raw apple pulp adds water and its own surface bacteria to an already unheated egg foam. The result is a moist, dilute coating rather than a sugar-saturated one, and a frosting of this kind would typically be left on a cake at room temperature.
- Not enough sugar to preserve itOne cup of confectioners' sugar to one white is a soft, spreadable ratio rather than the very stiff, sugar-saturated royal icing that dries hard. With two apples' worth of juice thinning it further, this frosting stays wet. If you want an uncooked apple frosting, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg whites or meringue powder.
- What the original units meanConfectioners' sugar is broadly the same product sold under that name today, though it was formerly sold in a range of grades. "The grated pulp of two raw apples" means the apples grated, juice and all; the recipe does not say whether the skin is included. Two medium apples yield a substantial quantity of wet pulp.
- BrowningEven setting the safety question aside, grated apple oxidizes within minutes; the book gives no lemon juice or other acid to prevent it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The mixture is soft and wet, and was not intended to be piped or to hold a shape.
Uncooked frostings of this kind — a white, a cup or so of powdered sugar, and whatever flavoring the house had — fill the frosting chapters of American household cookbooks from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth. They were the quick alternative to boiled icing, which demanded a sugar syrup, a thermometer or a cold-water test, and steady beating. Fruit-pulp versions were a way to get flavor and a little bulk without buying extracts or chocolate, with the fruit crushed or grated straight into the sugar. Raw egg in icing was unremarkable in this period, and remained so in print for decades; the reason it has largely disappeared from modern frosting chapters is the recognition, from the later twentieth century onward, that intact shell eggs can carry salmonella internally rather than only on the shell.