Home › Frostings › Lightning Frosting
Lightning Frosting
To the unbeaten white of an egg add a cupful and a quarter of confectioners' sugar, a few drops of rose water, and ten of vanilla, and the juice of half a lemon. This frosting will be very white and will harden in a few minutes. Nice on crackers or simple cookies for children.
This is royal icing in its oldest and simplest form: raw egg white stiffened with confectioners' sugar and nothing else. The method works, but the icing is never heated at any stage, and the book proposes feeding it to children.
- Raw egg white, never cookedNothing in this recipe brings the egg above room temperature. The sugar and lemon juice do not pasteurize it; there is no cooking step at all, and the icing is eaten as soon as it sets.
- Why that matters nowShell eggs are a recognised vehicle for Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean egg rather than only on the shell. The risk was not understood when this was written; it is now the reason uncooked-egg icings are no longer taught.
- The intended eaters are the wrong onesThe note recommends it on crackers and cookies for children. Young children are among the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become serious, which makes this the least suitable use for an uncooked egg preparation.
- No quantity fixes itUnlike a cured or canned recipe, there is no measurement here that could be brought into a safe range. The hazard is the ingredient, not the proportions.
- If you want this icingUse a current royal icing recipe built on meringue powder or pasteurized egg white. Both give the same hard, brilliant white finish this recipe is prized for.
- Reading the measuresFor the record: a cupful and a quarter of confectioners' sugar is about 150 g, and "ten" refers to ten drops of vanilla. The lemon juice is there to sharpen the flavour and help the icing set opaque white.
- Rose waterStill sold, but modern bottles vary enormously in strength, and a period recipe may well have in mind a milder distillate than some concentrated flavourings sold now.
Uncooked icings of this kind are often said to be a byproduct of the arrival of cheap, finely milled confectioners' sugar in the second half of the nineteenth century: once sugar could be bought already powdered, the argument runs, a cook no longer had to boil a syrup to the right thread to ice a cake, and a stiff white coating became a five-minute job rather than a project. That is what the name promises here. The type is generally traced to the same family as royal icing, the hard white glaze long recorded in British cookery and long used for wedding cakes, though this version is deliberately humble: no beating of the white, no cooked base, and a suggested use on crackers and plain cookies rather than on anything grand. Books of the Cook and Be Cool sort, aimed at the servantless household, favoured exactly these shortcuts, and the raw egg white in them passed without comment for decades before egg-borne salmonella was understood.