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Orange Icing
Mrs. Leonard Disney.
Grate rind of one orange and let soak in the juice of one-half of a large orange for thirty minutes. Strain through a fine wire sieve, and add, gradually, the yolks of two eggs, beaten light, two teaspoonfuls of lemon juice, and enough confectioner's sugar to make it the right consistency to spread. Mrs. George Wright.
Yolk 1 egg 4 T water 12 C sugar
This is an uncooked icing: the yolks are beaten raw into acid and sugar and spread on a finished cake, so nothing in the process ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. That is the reason for the caution, and it is worth understanding the rest of the page as well.
- Raw yolk, never heatedBoth versions rely on raw egg yolk as the liquid and binder. Orange and lemon juice are acidic but nowhere near acidic enough, fast enough, to sterilise egg; nor does confectioner's sugar. The icing sits at room temperature on the cake for hours, which is the range in which any contamination multiplies. Use a current recipe for a cooked or egg-free citrus icing instead.
- Two recipes, not oneThe page runs two contributors together. Mrs. Disney's is the full orange icing; Mrs. Wright's four-word entry is a separate, unnamed set of quantities with no method given.
- The second set of quantities is unreadable"12 C sugar" cannot mean twelve cups against one yolk and four tablespoons of water. It is a mangled fraction — 1/2 or 1 1/2 — and there is no way to tell which from the page. Do not guess at it.
- Confectioner's sugar then and nowPeriod confectioner's sugar was more variable in fineness than modern 10X and did not necessarily contain the anti-caking starch found in modern boxed powdered sugar. The recipe's 'enough ... to make it the right consistency' leaves the quantity to the cook in either case.
- T means tablespoon'T' is conventionally a tablespoon and 'C' a cup, which is the likeliest reading of Mrs. Wright's line. The two entries on this page do not abbreviate alike, which is a common hazard of community cookbooks.
- Straining the zestThe thirty-minute soak and the fine sieve exist to extract the orange oil from the rind without leaving gritty zest in the finished icing — a sensible technique that carries over to any modern citrus glaze.
Church and society cookbooks like this one appear to have been set in type largely as received — which is why one page can carry a carefully written paragraph from Mrs. Disney and a four-word shorthand note from Mrs. Wright, complete with a fraction that did not survive the printer. Uncooked egg-yolk icings are often said to have been common in American home baking well into the twentieth century, valued because raw yolk gives richness and a glossy, pale-gold set without the fuss of a boiled sugar syrup. The understanding that shell eggs could carry Salmonella internally, rather than only on a dirty shell, is a later development, and it is what retired this whole family of icings from modern published recipes.