Home › Cookery › Icing for Cake
Icing for Cake
Take three pounds cut or best quality of loaf sugar, dissolve it in a small quantity of water, boil to candy height or until it ropes. Have ready the whites of thirteen eggs well beaten. When the sugar is boiled sufficiently, pour it into a deep bowl, occasionally stirring it gently, until you can just bear your finger in it; then add the beaten egg all at once, beating it very hard for half an hour, when it is ready for use. Strain into the icing the juice of one lemon into which the peel has been grated, for half an hour.--Mrs. F.C.W.
This is a boiled-syrup icing, but the sequence is the reverse of the one that makes such icings safe: the syrup is deliberately cooled before it meets the eggs, so thirteen raw whites are never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The notes below explain the recipe's terms and where it fails.
- The hinge, and the problemIn a modern Italian meringue the syrup goes into the whites hot, at around 240F, and that heat cooks them as they whip. Here the cook is told to wait until she "can just bear" a finger in the sugar — hand-bearable, so perhaps 120-130F at most, and held nowhere near long enough to pasteurize — before adding the eggs. The whites are effectively raw, and the finished icing is spread on a cake and eaten without further cooking. Use a current recipe, built on pasteurized whites or on a syrup added hot, if you want this kind of frosting.
- Thirteen eggs is not a typoThree pounds of sugar to thirteen whites is a normal ratio for a period boiled icing, which was applied thickly and in several coats to large fruit and pound cakes. It also means a large volume of uncooked egg sitting at room temperature through a half-hour of beating, which is precisely the wrong condition.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar was sold in hard cones that had to be cut or nipped into lumps; "best quality of loaf" simply signals the whitest, purest sugar available. Ordinary granulated sugar is its direct descendant, weight for weight.
- Candy height, or until it ropesA pre-thermometer test. The syrup spins a thread from the spoon at roughly 230-235F; "candy height" in these books generally means the soft-ball range, about 235-240F. A candy thermometer replaces the guesswork entirely.
- Beating half an hourBy hand, with whatever whisk or beater the kitchen had, this was the labour that gave the icing its body. A stand mixer reaches the same stiffness in a fraction of the time — but speed does nothing about the raw eggs.
- The lemonThe last sentence reads as though something has gone astray in the setting: the juice of one lemon, with its peel grated in, is strained into the icing, and the trailing "for half an hour" looks as though it belongs to the beating. Acid helps stabilize the whites and cuts the sweetness.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialed housekeepers from Virginia and neighbouring states, which is why this page ends with "Mrs. F.C.W." rather than a tested house formula — the book is a collection of what individual kitchens actually did. Boiled icing of this kind belonged to the era of the great celebration cakes: dense pound and fruit cakes that kept for weeks and were armoured in a hard white shell of sugar and egg, sometimes built up in successive layers and left to dry near the fire. The extravagance of three pounds of loaf sugar is itself a period marker; refined white sugar was expensive enough that a heavily iced cake was a display of means as much as a dessert. The finger test for syrup temperature was one of several judgements cooks relied on before household thermometers became cheap, alongside the thread, feather and ball tests in water.