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Ornamental Frosting II
Whites 3 eggs 1 tablespoon lemon juice Confectioners' sugar, sifted Put eggs in a large bowl, add two tablespoons sugar, and beat three minutes, using a perforated wooden spoon. Repeat until one and one-half cups sugar are used. Add lemon juice gradually, as mixture thickens. Continue adding sugar by spoonfuls, and beating until frosting is stiff enough to spread. This may be determined by taking up some of mixture on back of spoon, and with a case knife making a cut through mixture; if knife makes a clean cut and frosting remains parted, it is of right consistency. Spread cake thinly with frosting; when this has hardened, put on a thicker layer, having mixture somewhat stiffer than first coating, and then crease for cutting. To remaining frosting add enough more sugar, that frosting may keep in shape after being forced through a pastry bag and tube.
With a pastry bag and variety of tubes, cake may be ornamented as desired.
This is the classic uncooked royal icing of the turn-of-the-century pastry kitchen, built on raw egg white and stiffened by sheer volume of sugar. The technique notes below are worth reading, but the frosting itself should not be made from this formula.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten with sugar and lemon juice and go onto the cake uncooked; nothing in the method brings them near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella, and the sugar concentration in a spreadable icing is not high enough to be reliably self-preserving. The decorated cake then sits at room temperature for hours or days, which is exactly the wrong holding condition. Use a current royal icing recipe instead.
- Confectioners' sugar then and nowPeriod confectioners' sugar was generally finely ground and sifted, with less (or no) added starch than modern boxes, which carry cornstarch as an anti-caking agent; that can affect the body and gloss of an icing built this way. Any old formula that calls for sugar "to the right consistency" may well take a different quantity today.
- The perforated wooden spoonA flat wooden spoon pierced with holes, a tool period cookbooks called for when working egg-white icings before hand mixers. The method here has you beat in short three-minute stretches, adding sugar between them, rather than in one continuous beating.
- Case knifeAn ordinary table knife, not a specialist tool. The test described -- drawing it through and seeing whether the cut holds its edges -- is a reasonable stiffness gauge for any icing of this type.
- Two coats and "crease for cutting"The thin first coat is a crumb seal; the second, stiffer coat is the finish. Creasing means scoring the surface along the intended slice lines before the icing sets hard, so the finished cake can be cut without shattering the shell.
- QuantityThree whites worked up with a cup and a half of sugar, plus further spoonfuls to stiffen, makes a generous amount -- enough to coat a cake twice and still leave icing to be stiffened further for the bag.
Ornamental frosting of this kind belongs to the era when a cake's surface was treated as architecture rather than confection: a hard white shell, scored for slicing, then built up with shells, scrolls and lattice forced through metal tubes. Pastry bags and interchangeable tubes moved from professional confectionery into American household use over the later nineteenth century, and cookery books of the period commonly distinguished soft frostings for eating from stiff ornamental ones for show. Lemon juice does real work here: the acid helps the whites hold their foam and cuts the flat sweetness of a frosting that is, by weight, mostly sugar. Such frostings were prized because they dried hard and kept their whiteness, letting a decorated cake stand on display.