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Icing (Pound sugar pint water)
1 1/2 pound sugar. 1/2 pint water.
Boil until it ropes. Have ready the whites of seven eggs well beaten, pour the syrup into a bowl, and beat until milk warm. Then put in the eggs, and beat for an hour.--Mrs. W.
This is a boiled sugar icing of the type that ordinarily relies on hot syrup to cook the egg whites. As written, it does the opposite: the syrup is cooled before the whites go in, so the eggs are never heated at all.
- Why it failsThe instruction to beat the syrup "until milk warm" — roughly body temperature — before adding the whites means seven raw egg whites go into a finished, uncooked frosting. Nothing in the method afterwards brings them anywhere near the 160F needed to reduce Salmonella, and the icing is eaten as is. A current boiled-icing or Swiss meringue recipe should be used instead.
- "Boil until it ropes"A nineteenth-century syrup stage judged by eye: the syrup falls from the spoon in a thread that holds rather than dripping, somewhere around the thread to soft-ball range. Household cooks of the period generally read the sugar by how it spun, roped, or beaded rather than by thermometer.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup. With 1 1/2 lb of sugar (about 3 1/3 cups) that gives a syrup a little on the wet side, which has to be boiled down to reach the roping stage.
- "Beat for an hour"Not hyperbole: the recipe means the full hour, which is what it took to work the mixture to a stiff, glossy, cooled icing. It is also an hour during which raw egg sits at room temperature, which compounds the problem above.
- Seven whitesLarge modern eggs give roughly 7 fl oz of white, probably more than Mrs. W. was cracking; period hen's eggs are generally reckoned to have run smaller and to have varied by season.
- ScaleThe quantities point to icing for a large cake rather than a single modest layer; boiled icings of this kind were spread thick and left to set firm.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, is a collective book: nearly every receipt carries the initials or name of the Virginia housewife who supplied it, and "Mrs. W." is one of dozens of such contributors. Boiled icings like this one belong to the era of the great white cakes — where the icing was expected to dry to a firm, chalk-white shell that could be scored or piped. The technique of beating hot sugar syrup into egg whites is often described as a forerunner of what American cookbooks later called boiled frosting, though seven-minute frosting is beaten over hot water rather than made by pouring hot syrup, and it spread widely in the second half of the nineteenth century as refined white sugar became cheap enough to use by the pound. The hour of beating is a reminder that the labour in a book like this was assumed rather than described.