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Ice Cream Frosting
1/4 C butter 2 C confectioner's sugar 1 egg Flavoring Cream the butter and add sugar gradually, creaming well. Add white of egg, well beaten, or if yellow frosting is desired, add the whole egg beaten. Flavor.
This is an uncooked butter-and-sugar frosting bound with raw egg, and it cannot be recommended as written.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe egg — white alone, or the whole egg for a yellow frosting — goes into the bowl raw and is never brought to any temperature. Spread on a cooled cake and left on the sideboard, it is a Salmonella risk with no step anywhere in the method that would reduce it. Cooked-meringue and Swiss/Italian buttercream methods exist precisely because of this; use a current recipe.
- The butter quantity is missingThe instructions begin "Cream the butter" but the ingredient list gives none. Whatever the original was, the recipe as printed is incomplete and cannot be reproduced faithfully.
- Confectioner's sugar then and nowPeriod powdered sugar was generally coarser and less consistently anti-caked than modern 10X, and some recipes of the era called for sifting it; this one does not. Adding it "gradually, creaming well" would help keep the mixture smooth.
- Why it is called ice cream frostingNothing in the recipe is frozen or churned, and there is no dairy beyond the butter. The name is usually taken to describe a frosting meant to stay soft and pale rather than set hard like a boiled or water icing, though that reading is inference rather than documented.
- YieldWith the butter quantity missing, the yield cannot be stated with confidence; two cups of sugar suggests roughly enough to cover a modest two-layer cake, but this is an estimate only.
Uncooked butter-and-sugar frostings became common in American cookbooks as commercially milled confectioner's sugar grew cheap and reliably fine. Earlier icings were largely boiled sugar syrups or raw egg-white-and-sugar glazes beaten by hand, both of which demanded judgment; a frosting that could simply be creamed together in a bowl was a convenience. The "ice cream" name is generally read as signalling a soft, pale finish rather than any connection to frozen desserts.