Cold Icing
Whites of 3 eggs. 1 pound sugar.
Beat very light and season with vanilla or lemon. After beating very lightly, add the white of another egg and it will give a pretty gloss upon the icing.--Miss E.P.
This is an uncooked royal-style icing: raw egg white beaten with sugar and left to dry in the air. Nothing in it ever reaches a temperature that would make the egg safe, which is the reason it should not be made from this text.
- The eggs are never cookedThe whites are beaten with sugar and spread, and the icing sets by drying rather than by heat. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and sugar and air-drying do not destroy it. A dried crust on the outside is no indication that the interior is safe.
- Who is most at riskCakes iced this way are typically served to whoever is at the table, including children, pregnant women, the elderly and anyone immunocompromised — precisely the groups for whom a raw-egg product carries the greatest consequence.
- The extra white makes it worseThe white added at the end for gloss goes in after the main beating and so receives the least beating of any egg in the recipe.
- What to use insteadModern royal icing is made with pasteurized egg whites or meringue powder, both of which are sold for exactly this purpose. Use a current recipe written for one of those products.
- On the name"Cold icing" distinguishes it from the boiled icings common in cookbooks of this period, where a hot sugar syrup is poured into the beaten whites. The distinction is not decorative — the boiled versions were the ones that got heat into the egg.
- The sugar quantityA pound of sugar to three whites is a stiff, spreadable ratio; the recipe does not specify the kind of sugar, but a pound of confectioners' sugar is roughly four cups.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from named Virginia housekeepers — hence the "Miss E.P." signature, one of many such initials and names running through the book. Icings of this kind belong to a moment when refined white sugar had become cheap enough for ordinary households to lavish on a cake, and when the alternative to beating raw whites by hand was boiling sugar to a thread and judging it by eye. Egg-borne illness was not understood in bacteriological terms when this was written; the connection between Salmonella and shell eggs was not established until well into the twentieth century.