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Icing (Break into a dish the whites)
Break into a dish the whites of four eggs. Whip in by degrees one and one-quarter pound of the finest loaf sugar, powdered and sifted. Beat till stiff and smooth, then add the strained juice of a large lemon with a few drops of oil of lemon, and beat again; in all beat half an hour. If too stiff add a little more white of egg. Some persons put it on with a knife, but it is far smoother and more evenly spread over the cake if put on with a large spoon. Dip up a spoonful of the icing and pour it from the spoon over the cake. Pour it over the top of the cake and it will diffuse itself down the sides. To color icing yellow, steep the rind of an orange or lemon in the lemon juice before straining it into the icing. To make it pink, put in strawberry or cranberry juice with the lemon juice.---Mrs. S.T.
A boiled-free, uncooked royal icing of the kind that carried nineteenth-century layer and fruit cakes. The notes below explain the archaic terms and why the egg whites are the problem.
- Why not as writtenThe whites are never heated at any point, and the finished icing sits at room temperature on the cake for hours or days. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and sugar and acid do not reliably kill it. Use a current royal icing recipe instead.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard refined cone that the cook broke up, pounded in a mortar and sifted. "Powdered and sifted" is the household equivalent of what we buy as confectioners' or icing sugar; 1¼ lb is roughly 4½ cups.
- Oil of lemonAn essential oil pressed from the peel, sold by druggists and much stronger than extract. If you use it in any recipe, it must be a food-grade oil and measured in drops, not spoonfuls.
- Half an hour of beatingThat figure assumes hand beating; the recipe specifies only a dish and gives no implement. The long beating is what dissolves the sugar crystals and gives the smooth, matte surface; a stand mixer reaches the same point far sooner.
- The pouring techniqueThe instruction to flood the top with a large spoon and let the icing find its own way down the sides is sound and still used. It depends on the icing being loose enough to level itself, which is why the recipe offers extra white rather than extra sugar as the correction.
- The coloringsSteeping citrus rind in the juice, or adding strawberry or cranberry juice, tints weakly and thins the icing. Berry juice also fades and browns within a day or two.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like this "Mrs. S.T.", comes from a period when many households still pounded and sifted their own sugar. Icing of this sort — beaten egg white, pounded sugar and lemon — is the ancestor of what is now called royal icing, a name generally traced to its use on grand British celebration cakes; American books of the period more often just called it icing or frosting and distinguished it from the cooked, boiled-sugar frostings that were gaining ground at the same time. The lemon juice does real work beyond flavor: acid helps the whites hold their structure and keeps the mass white rather than dull. That a Virginia housekeeper was expected to pound and sift her own sugar and to beat by hand for half an hour is a fair measure of what an iced cake signified in a nineteenth-century household.