Quick Fondant
Flavoring Confectioners' sugar Beat the egg very stiff; stir in as much confectioners' sugar as the egg will hold; flavor and mold into small balls. * A candy thermometer does away with much guesswork. Special directions are usually furnished with such conveniences.
This is an uncooked fondant: raw egg beaten stiff and stiffened with confectioners' sugar, then rolled and eaten as is. Nothing in the method ever reaches a temperature that would make the egg safe.
- The egg is never cookedThere is no heating step at any point — the balls are molded and served. Raw egg is a recognised vehicle for Salmonella, and in an uncooked confection the risk carries straight through to the plate.
- Sugar is not a kill stepConfectioners' sugar lowers water activity but does not pasteurize anything, and fondant balls are eaten within hours or days rather than held long enough for that to matter. The candy remains a raw-egg product.
- Who eats candySmall sweets like these are typically handed to children, and children, elderly people, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised are precisely the groups for whom raw egg is most dangerous.
- The recipe is not specifiedThe original refers only to 'the egg' without saying whether it is white or whole, and 'as much confectioners' sugar as the egg will hold' fixes no quantity. There is no way to reproduce it consistently even setting the egg aside.
- The thermometer note belongs elsewhereThe asterisked line about candy thermometers reads as a general footnote for the candy section rather than a direction for this recipe; it would apply to boiled fondants and syrups, not to this uncooked one, which never sees heat at all.
- If you want fondantUse a current recipe. Cooked sugar fondants and pasteurized-product methods are both well documented in modern candy books.
Fondant — from the French fondre, to melt, for the way a properly worked sugar paste dissolves on the tongue — was a staple of home candy-making in the early twentieth century, used as a center for chocolates, a filling for dates and nuts, and a base for mints. The real article is made by boiling sugar syrup to the soft-ball stage, cooling it undisturbed, then creaming it until the sugar recrystallizes in grains too fine to feel, which is the kind of work a candy thermometer footnote would refer to. "Quick" or "uncooked" fondants like this one circulated as a shortcut in cookbooks of the period, at a time when a raw egg white was treated as an ordinary pantry binder and the link between eggs and foodborne illness was not yet part of household knowledge.