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Orange Frosting
Grated ring 1 orange 1 teaspoon brandy 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon orange juice Yolk 1 egg Confectioners' sugar Add rind to brandy and fruit juice; let stand fifteen minutes. Strain, and add gradually to yolk of egg slightly beaten. Stir in confectioners' sugar until of right consistency to spread.
This is an uncooked frosting built on a raw egg yolk, and nothing in the method brings that yolk anywhere near a safe temperature. The notes below explain the problem rather than working around it.
- The yolk is never cookedThe yolk is beaten cold and simply thickened with sugar, then spread on a cake and eaten. Salmonella in an intact shell egg is killed by heat, not by mixing; there is no step here that approaches the temperatures at which a yolk is pasteurized.
- The acid and brandy do not sterilize anythingA teaspoon of brandy and a spoonful or so of citrus juice, diluted into sugar, give neither the alcohol concentration nor the pH drop that would reduce pathogens. Their job in this formula is flavour and thinning, nothing more.
- Standing time works against youThe finished frosting sits on a cake at room temperature, often for hours. That is holding time in the range where bacteria multiply fastest.
- Who is most at riskChildren, elderly people and pregnant women are the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to be serious, and an uncooked-egg icing gives them no protection.
- No quantity is given for the sugarEven setting the egg aside, the recipe specifies confectioners' sugar only as "until of right consistency," and gives no way to reproduce the amount exactly.
- If you want an orange icingUse a current recipe. Modern versions either omit the egg entirely or use a cooked or pasteurized-egg base, and those instructions belong to the recipe that was tested with them.
Uncooked frostings bound with raw yolk appear in American domestic cookery from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s, alongside boiled icings and plain water glazes. The yolk contributed colour and richness and some emulsifying power to carry the fruit juice, and a little brandy or other spirit turns up in similar formulas where grated rind alone was thought flat. Steeping the zest in spirit and juice before straining has a practical logic: the aromatic oils in citrus peel are more soluble in alcohol than in water, so the fifteen-minute wait draws out flavour and the strainer keeps the rind out of a smooth spread. The recipe reflects a period before commercial egg pasteurization and modern salmonella surveillance, both of which belong to a later era.