Jelly Meringue
white of 1 egg 1/2 cup currant or grape jelly Put egg white and jelly together into bowl and beat with egg beater or wire whip until stiff. Spread between layers or on top of cake.
This is a two-ingredient uncooked frosting, and the problem is precisely that: nothing in it is ever heated. The notes below explain the failure and the period details worth knowing.
- The egg white is never cookedThe white is whipped with cold jelly and spread straight onto the cake, so it never reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Unlike a boiled icing, where hot syrup at 238-240F is streamed into the whites, or a seven-minute frosting beaten over simmering water, this one has no heat step at all. Use a current recipe for an uncooked or lightly cooked meringue frosting instead.
- It also will not keepAn unheated white-and-jelly foam left on a cake at room temperature for a day is holding a raw egg at room temperature for a day. A frosting of this kind was presumably meant to be eaten the same day it was made.
- What "jelly" means hereA firm home-put-up fruit jelly; the recipe names currant or grape. A stiff jelly of this kind is what allows half a cup to carry a single egg white into a spreadable foam.
- Why it foams at allThe sugar in the jelly helps stabilize the white as it is beaten, giving a fluff tinted by the fruit without any cooking. It sits alongside the older "snow" and "whip" desserts that also beat raw whites with fruit.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One white and half a cup of jelly beat up to a modest quantity of foam — enough to spread thinly between layers or over a top.
- Equipment note"Egg beater" in a book of this date would usually be a hand-cranked rotary beater, though the recipe also allows a wire whip. A stand mixer does the work quickly; the mixture is ready when it holds a peak and no longer slides in the bowl.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, whose business was selling leavening to home bakers. Beaten fruit-jelly foams belong to a family of dishes that used raw egg white as an aerator: apple snow, prune whip, and the various "jelly creams" and "fruit whips" that appear in American and British household manuals through the nineteenth century. Currants are naturally high in pectin and set reliably without added commercial pectin, which is one reason currant jelly turns up so often in such recipes. The appeal of this frosting is that, unlike a boiled icing or a seven-minute frosting, it needs neither a thermometer nor a double boiler — the same absence of heat that makes it unsuitable to make today.