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Confectioners' Frosting
Beat the white of an egg stiff, add gradually two teaspoonfuls of cold water and enough confectioners' sugar to make the right consistency to spread. Flavor with almond and color with a tiny speck of green coloring paste.
A one-egg royal icing of the sort that turned up in nearly every early twentieth-century cake chapter. The problem is structural rather than technical: the egg white is never heated at any point, and the finished frosting sits at room temperature on the cake.
- The uncooked egg whiteNothing in this method brings the white above room temperature, and the sugar and few teaspoons of water do not pasteurise it. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that is concentrated precisely in this kind of no-cook icing, which is then left out for hours or days on a cake.
- Why the sugar does not helpBoiled and fondant icings are cooked to the soft-ball range and cooked meringues are held over hot water; both bring the egg up to temperature. Confectioners' frosting is never heated at all, so however hard it sets, the egg in it remains raw.
- What to use insteadFollow a current royal icing recipe built on pasteurised egg whites or meringue powder. Those give the same brittle, spreadable, pipeable result without the raw-shell-egg problem.
- "Almond" flavoringRead as almond extract, a few drops. Older books sometimes meant bitter almond oil, which is not an interchangeable ingredient and is not sold for domestic use in the same form today.
- Coloring pastePaste or gel colors are still the right choice for icing, since liquid colors thin it and force in more sugar. "A tiny speck" is accurate: paste color is far stronger than it looks on the toothpick.
- The vague quantity"Enough confectioners' sugar" is genuinely open-ended; the cook is meant to judge by whether the icing holds a soft ridge and spreads. The book gives no figure.
Confectioners' sugar icings spread as finely milled sugar became a cheap grocery item, and they took over a good deal of the work that had previously required boiled sugar judged by thermometer or the cold-water test. A frosting like this one needed no cooking, no candy stage and no judgment about soft-ball -- just a bowl, a fork and a box of sugar. The green tint and almond flavor point to a pistachio effect, in which color and almond stood in for a nut that was expensive and, in the United States, largely imported.