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Vanilla Frosting
2 egg whites, beaten stiff 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat egg whites very stiff. Add sugar, a little at a time. Flavor.
This is an uncooked royal-style frosting: raw egg white beaten with sugar and spread on a finished cake, with no heating at any stage. That is the reason it cannot be recommended today, and the notes below explain the specifics.
- Nothing is ever cookedThe whites go from shell to cake untouched by heat. Unlike a boiled or seven-minute frosting, where syrup at 240F is poured into the whites, or a meringue that finishes in the oven, this recipe has no step that would bring the egg above room temperature.
- The pathogen riskSalmonella can be present in and on shell eggs, and sugar does not kill it. A frosting sits at room temperature on a cake for hours, which favors bacterial growth rather than checking it. The people most often served company cake -- children, elderly relatives, anyone pregnant or immune-compromised -- are exactly the people for whom the consequences are worst.
- Why 1930s cooks did not worryRaw-egg icings, eggnogs and uncooked mayonnaise were routine in home cookbooks of this era. The modern understanding of Salmonella enteritidis in intact eggs dates from later in the century, and the advice against raw egg in unheated preparations followed from it.
- Use a current recipe insteadIf you want a white, spreadable frosting for a layer cake, work from a modern recipe for a cooked or buttercream frosting. Do not attempt to patch this one.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" usually means what is now sold as confectioners' or 10X sugar, finely ground and generally cut with a little cornstarch. Usage was not entirely consistent, however: some American and British texts of the era use "powdered" for a coarser ground sugar closer to caster.
- Quantity, for referenceTwo whites and 1 1/2 cups of sugar makes roughly enough for a thin coat on a single 8-inch layer cake, or a modest batch of cookies.
Uncooked white icings of beaten egg white and powdered sugar are among the oldest sweet finishes in the English-language kitchen, descending from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sugar pastes that were beaten by hand at length and left to dry hard on a rich fruit cake. The same mixture survives in confectionery as royal icing, where it is piped and left to set rather than eaten by the spoonful. It is also a reminder of how thoroughly assumptions about raw egg have shifted in less than a century.