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Ornamental Frosting
1 cup powdered sugar White of 1 egg 1 teaspoon lemon juice This frosting is to be used only for decoration on a cake that has already been iced.
Beat the egg until it is frothy but not dry; add three teaspoons of sugar and beat five minutes; add one teaspoon every five minutes until the frosting is thick; then add the lemon juice. Continue beating until a point of the mixture will keep any form; press through a pastry tube upon the cake as desired.
This is royal icing built on an uncooked egg white, and the icing is never heated at any stage — it dries on the cake and is eaten as it stands.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe white goes onto an already-iced cake and is only air-dried. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, which can be present in the white as well as the yolk. Drying is not pasteurising; a stiff, hard-set piped decoration can still carry viable bacteria weeks later.
- Who is most at riskOrnamental frosting goes on celebration cakes served to whoever is at the table — small children, pregnant women, the elderly, anyone immunocompromised. That is precisely the group for whom raw shell egg is advised against.
- Acid does not sterilise itThe teaspoon of lemon juice is there for whiteness and stability, not safety. The quantity is far too small, and the contact time far too short, to have any antimicrobial effect on the white.
- What to do insteadUse a current royal icing recipe built on pasteurised egg white or meringue powder. Those give the same piping behaviour without the uncooked shell egg.
- Reading the method, if only for interestThe slow addition — three teaspoons of sugar, then one teaspoon every five minutes — is deliberate. Adding powdered sugar gradually to a frothy white is the usual way of building a fine, dense foam that will hold a piped point. The test given, that a point of the mixture will keep its form, is still the standard one.
- Powdered sugarHere this is most likely the fine-ground sugar a modern American cook would reach for as confectioners' or 10X, though period usage of 'powdered' was not fixed and did not always imply the starch-cut product sold today. A cup of modern confectioners' sugar is roughly 4 oz / 115 g, and the recipe itself says this is a decorating batch for a cake already iced, not enough to cover one.
Piped ornamental frosting is generally traced to the era when the pastry bag and metal tube became ordinary household equipment rather than professional confectioners' kit — American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often said to increasingly assume a home cook owns a set of tubes and can manage a shell border or a name across the top. The distinction Mrs. Fryer draws, between the icing that covers the cake and the stiffer decorating frosting laid over it, is the standard one of the period: the cake has already been iced, and then a sugar-and-white mixture beaten to a holding point is used for the ornament.