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Four Whites of Eggs (Juice of two Lemons)
The juice of two Lemons.
Two pounds of Icing Sugar. Rub the sugar through a hair-sieve into a basin, make a well in the sugar and pour in the whites of eggs and lemon-juice, work these all well together with a wooden spoon until quite soft. Put two layers of this icing with a knife, you must dip the knife in water from time to time to prevent it sticking. The third layer must be clear icing made thus: One pound of loaf sugar, half a pint of water boiled together for fifteen to twenty minutes and reduced to a syrup. Stir in a basin till nearly cold and pour over the cake.
When this is dry, ornament with the first icing through a forcer.
This is Victorian royal icing, printed as a continuation of a cake entry — the sugar quantity for the first icing sits in the previous line of the book and never reaches the page. Everything else is workable once the vocabulary is translated.
- The missing quantityThe recipe never states how much sugar goes with the four whites and two lemons. Standard practice for royal icing is roughly 250 g (8 oz) of sifted icing sugar per egg white, so around 1 kg / 2 lb here; add it gradually and stop when the icing holds a soft peak. Treat any single figure as a starting point rather than a conversion of the original.
- Which sugarThe sugar rubbed through the sieve is icing (confectioners') sugar. Modern icing sugar contains anti-caking starch and is already fine, but still sift it — a single lump will block a fine piping tube.
- Hair sieve, basin, forcerA hair sieve is a fine mesh strainer; a basin is a mixing bowl; a forcer is a piping bag and tube. Nothing in the equipment list has no modern equivalent.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone, prized for its purity. Ordinary granulated sugar is the nearest modern equivalent for a boiled syrup of this kind.
- The clear icing is fondantOne pound of sugar to half a pint of water boiled for fifteen to twenty minutes reduces to a heavy syrup; the recipe names no temperature, and how far it concentrates will depend on your pan and heat, so judge the syrup rather than trust a figure. Stirring it in the basin as it cools is deliberate: it forces the syrup to grain into the smooth white paste we call poured fondant. The original pours it while nearly cold, so keep it moving and work fast.
- Raw whitesNeither icing is cooked. If the cake is for children, pregnant women or anyone immune-compromised, use pasteurised egg white or dried albumen powder, which pipes much the same.
- Drying timeEach royal icing layer needs several hours, better overnight, in a dry room before the next goes on. The fondant layer also has to be genuinely dry — tacky fondant will pull the piped decoration out of shape.
- Keeping it workableRoyal icing crusts within minutes in open air. Keep the bowl covered with a damp cloth or cling film pressed to the surface between applications, and the dipped-knife trick in the original will work far better.
Royal icing is the hard white shell that defined British celebration cakes from the mid-nineteenth century onward; the name is generally traced to the elaborately iced cake made for Queen Victoria's wedding in 1840, though the technique of beating sugar with egg white and lemon juice is older than the story. The lemon juice contributes flavour, and is also often said to help the whites whip smooth and set brittle rather than rubbery. The three-layer scheme here, two coats of royal icing, then poured fondant, then piped decoration, follows a logic of its own: the rough coats build a true flat surface, the fondant gives the glassy finish, and the piping goes on last where it can be seen. That a book called High Class Cookery Recipes assumes a domestic cook owns a forcer and can judge a sugar syrup by eye says a good deal about the standard expected in a well-staffed late-Victorian kitchen.