Home › Cookery › Icing for Cakes
Icing for Cakes
Whites of six eggs to one pound sugar, or one egg to three teaspoonfuls of sugar.--Mrs. Dr. J.
A one-line ratio for an uncooked meringue icing, of the kind spread on a cake and left to dry in the air or in a barely warm oven. The proportions are the whole of the instruction, and the method they imply is the problem.
- Why this one fails todayRaw whites beaten with sugar and spread on a finished cake are never brought to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the icing sits at room temperature for hours or days while it dries. Use a current recipe built on pasteurised whites, meringue powder, or a cooked syrup instead.
- The sugar in question"One pound sugar" is unspecified in the original; for an icing of this date it was most likely loaf or crushed sugar pounded and sieved fine, close to modern confectioners' sugar minus the cornstarch, though refined granulated was also on sale by 1879. Coarse granulated dissolves poorly in cold whites and tends toward a gritty, weeping icing.
- The two ratios do not agreeSix whites to a pound of sugar is roughly two and a half ounces of sugar per white, several times the "three teaspoonfuls" (one tablespoon) of the second figure. Treat the second as a rough memorandum rather than a scaled-down version of the first.
- What "icing" meantThe recipe supplies no method. Icings of this composition were commonly spread with a knife dipped in cold water and left to harden, and are effectively the same thing as royal icing rather than a forerunner of buttercream.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of entries like this one: a bare ratio credited to a neighbour, on the assumption that any cook reading it had beaten whites before and needed only the proportion. Icing made of nothing but whites and finely powdered sugar was the standard finish for pound and fruit cakes through the century, and its quality depended on the sugar: a cook broke down a hard loaf with a mallet and sieved it herself. The habit of attributing each receipt to its donor -- "Mrs. Dr. J." -- also tells you what the book was: less a manual than a community's collected practice, printed in the decades when Southern households were reassembling their domestic routines after the Civil War.