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Ornamental Frosting
To the whites of two eggs add two tablespoonfuls of confectioners' sugar, beat for two minutes and then add sufficient sugar to make the right consistency to spread. Stir in a tablespoonful of lemon juice, beat again and put on cake from a pastry bag through a fancy tube.
This is a classic raw-egg royal icing, and that is the problem with it. The frosting is never heated at any point, and it sits on a finished cake at room temperature.
- Uncooked egg whiteThe whites go onto the cake exactly as they come out of the shell. Salmonella on or in a shell egg is not destroyed by beating it with sugar, and no stage of this recipe brings the mixture anywhere near a temperature that would kill it.
- Sugar is not a safeguardA hard-dried royal icing crust does eventually become inhospitable to bacterial growth, but drying does not sterilise it, and the soft interior of piped work stays moist for a long time. Any pathogen present at the start can still be there when the cake is served.
- Who it reachesOrnamental frosting is decoration, and decorated cakes are often served to children, the elderly and the pregnant — precisely the people for whom raw egg carries the worst consequences.
- What the recipe leaves outThere is no quantity for the bulk of the sugar at all, only "sufficient sugar," and no drying time before the cake is handled or stacked. Even setting the egg aside, there is not enough here to work from.
- If you want piped decorationUse a current royal icing recipe. Modern ones exist in versions that do not rely on raw shell eggs, and they specify sugar quantities and consistency stages that this entry does not.
Royal icing — stiff, brilliant white, piped through a fancy tube — was a common finish for wedding and christening cakes by the later nineteenth century, by which time pastry bags and metal tubes were widely available and confectioners' sugar could be bought ready-milled rather than pounded and sifted at home. The name is popularly associated with its use on grand British celebration cakes, though this is tradition rather than documented etymology; the technique came out of the professional confectioner's trade and filtered into domestic cookbooks. A book of this vintage assumes the reader already knows what "the right consistency to spread" feels like, and treats raw egg white on a cake as unremarkable — an assumption about eggs that twentieth-century food safety work overturned.