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Boiled Icing (Pound cut sugar or double)
1½ pound cut sugar, or double refined. 1 teacup of water. 6 whites of eggs. Boil the sugar to candy height; when nearly cold put in eggs.--Miss E.P.
A nineteenth-century boiled icing, but with the order reversed from modern practice: the syrup is cooled before the whites go in, which means the egg is never heated at all.
- Why this one failsIn a modern boiled or seven-minute icing the syrup goes into the whites at 238-245F, and that heat both stabilises the whites and reduces (though it does not reliably eliminate) any bacterial risk. Here the sugar is cooled to "nearly cold" first, so the whites are beaten in raw and stay raw in the finished icing. Uncooked egg white carries a real, if small, Salmonella risk, and an icing that sits at room temperature on a cake for a day or two does nothing to reduce it. Use a current boiled-icing or Italian-meringue recipe instead.
- Cut sugar and double refinedBoth terms describe the whitest, purest sugar available at the time: hard cones of refined loaf sugar, either cut into lumps with sugar nippers or refined a second time. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent grade today, so 1 1/2 lb is about 3 1/3 cups.
- A teacupAn inexact measure in cookbooks of this period, variously reckoned at anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz. For a sugar syrup the exact water quantity matters little, since it is boiled off to a temperature, not a volume.
- Candy heightAn older term for boiling a syrup to the stage where a drop hardens in cold water, somewhere in the ball-to-crack range, though period sources do not agree on an exact temperature. Cooks judged it by eye and by how a drop behaved in cold water; a thermometer is the modern substitute.
- YieldSix whites and 1 1/2 lb of sugar is a very large batch by present standards, enough to ice and fill a substantial layer cake, or several.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered recipes from a wide circle of contributors, who appear as here under initials rather than full names. Boiled icing belonged to the era when sugar came as a hard refined loaf that had to be broken up and clarified, and when the whiteness of a cake's covering advertised the quality of sugar a household could afford; "double refined" was the top grade and cost accordingly. Beaten egg white had been used to whiten and stiffen sugar since well before this, and the boiled-syrup version asked a cook to judge the sugar stages by eye, without a thermometer.