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Cream Frosting
Beat 1 egg white until stiff, add 2 teaspoons cream 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and, slowly, 3/4 cup confectioners' sugar, and more if needed to make of right consistency to spread. Divide into several portions, and color with a bit of Color paste, pale yellow, pink, green, or lavender.
This is an uncooked royal-style icing built on raw egg white, and that is the problem with it: nothing in the method ever brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella.
- The raw egg whiteThe white is beaten and sweetened but never cooked, and the finished frosting sits at room temperature on a cake for hours. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella enteritidis in the white as well as the yolk, and sugar and a few drops of vanilla do nothing to it. Use a current recipe if you want a spreadable white icing.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg frostings are specifically discouraged for children, pregnant women, adults over 65 and anyone immunocompromised.
- "Color paste"The period product was a concentrated gel or paste colour sold in small pots, the forerunner of today's gel food colouring. A number of the early coal-tar dyes have since been delisted, though some of the permitted colours in use today descend from the same family.
- Confectioners' sugarThen as now this is finely milled sugar cut with a little starch, so the quantity is genuinely elastic — the original's "more if needed" reflects how much the starch content and the humidity of the day affect stiffness.
- YieldOne egg white with 3/4 cup or so of sugar makes only a small quantity of icing; the recipe has it divided into several portions so that each can be tinted a different colour.
Frostings of this kind — a beaten white, a spoonful of cream or lemon juice, and as much sifted sugar as the mixture will take — were a common home decorating icing through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before buttercreams largely displaced them. The appeal was that it needed no thermometer, no sugar syrup and no cooking. The pastel palette here is of its moment: pale yellow, pink, green and lavender were expected colours for small tinted cakes served at luncheons and afternoon suppers. Concentrated colour pastes, sold in tiny pots through grocers and bakery suppliers, made such a palette easier to achieve at home.