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Confectioners' Frosting
1 egg-white 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Beat the egg-white stiff and add the sugar gradually; continue beating until the mixture is smooth and light. Add flavoring.
A three-ingredient uncooked icing of the sort that filled cookbooks before egg safety was understood. The notes below explain what the ingredients mean and why this particular formula is no longer made.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in this method brings the white above room temperature, and the frosting sits on a finished cake for hours or days. Salmonella in shell eggs is a real risk in an uncooked, unacidified icing, and beating does nothing to reduce it. A current recipe should be used instead.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereHalf a cup of sugar to one white is far less than a stiff royal icing, which generally carries several times that much sugar per white. Whatever its texture, the mixture offers no meaningful microbial barrier.
- Confectioners' sugarThe same product sold today as powdered or icing sugar, cut with about 3 percent cornstarch to keep it free-flowing. Period grinds were not standardized as they are now, though this recipe gives no sifting instruction.
- "Beat stiff" by handThe recipe names no equipment; a whisk or rotary egg beater would have been the usual tools. A stand mixer reaches the same stage in a fraction of the time, and overbeating past stiff peaks leaves the white grainy and weeping.
- What it was meant to coverOne white and half a cup of sugar makes a small quantity of frosting, suited to the top of a single layer or a few cookies rather than filling and covering a layer cake.
Uncooked frostings built on a raw white and powdered sugar were the quickest sort of icing, alongside boiled frosting (sugar syrup poured into beaten whites) and plain butter-and-sugar. Under names like confectioners' frosting, plain icing or royal icing, formulas of this kind are common in general American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, valued because they needed no thermometer, no candy stage and no stove. The New Delineator Recipes was published under the name of The Delineator, the Butterick pattern company's home magazine, and its fillings-and-frostings chapter runs to short formulas scaled to a single layer cake and written for a cook without much specialized equipment. Raw egg was not treated as a safety question in such preparations at the time.