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Orange Frosting
confectioners' sugar 4 tablespoons orange juice 2 egg yolks grated rind one orange 1 teaspoon lemon juice Soak rind in fruit juice one half hour; strain; add remaining ingredients until of consistency to spread.
This is an uncooked frosting: the yolks go in raw and nothing in the method brings them to a temperature that would make them safe. That is the reason it should be read rather than made.
- Raw yolks, no cooking stepThe two egg yolks are beaten into sugar and citrus juice and spread on a finished cake. Nothing here reaches the 160F needed to destroy Salmonella in egg, and the acid from four tablespoons of orange juice plus a teaspoon of lemon juice is nowhere near enough to do the job chemically.
- Why it mattered less in 1907Eggs were more often from small local flocks and used soon after laying, and uncooked-yolk frostings, custards and eggnogs appear frequently in cookbooks of the period. Modern egg-borne Salmonella enteritidis is largely a distribution-scale problem that this method has no defence against.
- It sits at room temperatureA frosted cake is left out for hours and often a day or more. That is the worst case for raw egg: time and warmth on a moist, sugary surface. Refrigeration would not make the recipe sound, only slower to spoil.
- The sugar quantity is missingThe text opens with "confectioners' sugar" and no amount. Whether that is a printing loss or a deliberate omission cannot be told from the page; the direction to add ingredients "until of consistency to spread" suggests the sugar was to be judged by eye, so no reliable conversion can be supplied.
- The one technique worth keepingSteeping the grated rind in the juice for half an hour and then straining is a genuinely good move: it pulls the aromatic oils out of the zest and leaves no fibrous flecks in the frosting. The idea transfers to any modern orange icing.
- If you want an orange frostingUse a current recipe, whether a plain confectioners' sugar and orange juice glaze or a properly cooked or pasteurised-egg buttercream.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, in the same tradition as the Baker's and Hershey's promotional cookbooks: a full general cookbook that also served to keep the firm's cocoa and chocolate in the kitchen. It carries a large number of frostings, and cheap, finely milled confectioners' sugar of the period made uncooked icings possible without a sugar thermometer or a boiled syrup. Egg-yolk frostings like this one are richer and yellower than a plain water icing, and are stiffened by yolk rather than by butter. Steeping citrus zest in juice and straining it also appears in other books of the period.