Egg Fondant
To the white of an egg add two teaspoonfuls of water, a teaspoonful of vanilla and enough sifted confectioners' sugar (teaspoonful at a time) to make a stiff paste. When stiff put onto a bread board or marble slab and knead with the hands until perfectly smooth. It may be colored and flavored in any way preferred.
This is an uncooked fondant: raw egg white bound with powdered sugar and never heated at any stage. That single fact rules it out for a modern kitchen.
- The egg white is never cookedNothing in this method brings the egg above room temperature, and kneading on a board only spreads any contamination through the whole batch. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and a raw sweet that sits at room temperature for hours or days is the worst case.
- Sugar does not sterilise itA stiff sugar paste is often assumed to be self-preserving, but egg-white fondant is not dry enough or acidic enough to reliably kill or halt bacteria. Traditional boiled fondants and cooked frostings reach a temperature that does; this one does not.
- Who is most at riskWhatever such sweets were originally intended for, a raw-egg product is most dangerous to the vulnerable. Pregnancy, young children, older adults and anyone immunocompromised should not be served it in any form.
- Use a current recipe insteadModern confectionery achieves the same smooth, kneadable white paste without shell eggs at all. If you want this result, follow a present-day recipe rather than adapting these proportions.
- Reading the original"Fondant" here means the pliable sugar dough used for moulding centres, mints and stuffed dates, not the rolled covering sold for cakes today. Modern confectioners' sugar generally contains a little cornstarch as an anti-caking agent, so a paste made with it may behave somewhat differently from one made with the sugar the author had.
- The marble slabThe recipe allows either a bread board or a marble slab. Marble is the usual choice in candy work because it stays cool and draws heat out of the mass, and that part of the technique is still used.
Uncooked egg-white fondant was the shortcut version of a nineteenth-century confectioner's staple. Proper fondant meant boiling a sugar syrup to the soft-ball stage, working it on marble until it turned opaque, and letting it ripen — a project needing a thermometer or a practised hand. Egg white and sifted sugar gave a home cook the same mouldable paste in ten minutes, with no boiling and no guesswork, which is why such recipes crowd the candy chapters of household books over a long stretch of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paste was tinted with vegetable colours, flavoured with vanilla, rose or peppermint, and used to fill dates and prunes, coat nuts, or centre chocolate creams. Its disappearance from cookbooks is often attributed to the spread of public-health advice on raw eggs in the later twentieth century, and to the arrival of meringue powder and pasteurised whites as commercial substitutes.