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Chocolate Filling and Icing (Whites of eggs cups)
whites of 2 eggs 1 1/3 cups confectioner's sugar 1 1/2 tablespoons milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 4 ounces chocolate 1 teaspoon butter Beat whites until stiff; add sugar slowly, beating all the time; add milk, vanilla and chocolate which has been melted with butter; mix until smooth. Spread on cake.
The method is sound cake-shop practice for its date, but the eggs are never cooked and never heated, and the icing is eaten as it stands. A few of the ingredient terms also mean something different now.
- The eggs are raw and stay rawNothing in this method brings the whites above room temperature — the melted chocolate is a few tablespoons against two whites and a cup and a third of sugar, and it cannot pasteurise them. Uncooked shell-egg white carries a Salmonella risk that was not understood when the book was written, and an icing spread on a cake may sit at room temperature for hours, which favours the organism rather than the eater. Use a current recipe built on pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue if you want this style of filling.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereThe proportion of sugar to white is high enough to sweeten but nowhere near high enough to lower water activity to a safe level, as it would be in a hard-drying royal icing left for days. This is a soft spreading icing, and it stays a moist raw-egg product.
- "Chocolate" means unsweetened blockIn American books of this kind, plain "chocolate" sold and measured by the ounce is normally unsweetened baking chocolate, not eating chocolate and not chips. A modern semisweet bar in its place would give a sweeter, softer result.
- Confectioner's sugarThe same thing as today's powdered or icing sugar. Period grinds could be coarser, and some brands carried added starch; modern 10x sifts and dissolves readily, so it may incorporate faster than the instruction to "add slowly" implies.
- The one point of techniqueThe chocolate and butter are best barely melted and cooled to lukewarm before they meet the whites. Hot chocolate collapses the foam and the icing goes grainy and thin.
- YieldAbout enough to fill and thinly ice one two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake.
Uncooked egg-white icings were a familiar feature of American home baking into the twentieth century, and the pattern here — whites beaten stiff, powdered sugar worked in, a flavouring and a little liquid — is close to what later cookbooks called plain frosting. A recipe of this sort earns its place because it doubles as filling and icing, saving the household cook a second bowl and a second set of measurements. The reliance on raw whites reflects a period when eggs were generally used soon after they were laid; commercial egg distribution, refrigeration and the identification of egg-associated Salmonella as a public-health problem all came later, and it is that shift, rather than any change in taste, that has retired the method.