Egg Frosting
Confectioners' or pulverized sugar Lemon juice Put whites of 2 eggs in a bowl, add 1 tablespoon sifted confectioner's sugar, beat three minutes. Add another tablespoon sugar, beat again; continue until icing is very stiff and glossy, adding 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Spread on cake; let it stand till dry.
This is an uncooked royal icing: raw egg white beaten with sugar and acid, spread on cake and left to air-dry. Nothing in the method ever brings the egg to a safe temperature, which is why it does not belong in a modern kitchen.
- The egg is never cookedThe whites go on the cake raw and stay raw. Air-drying at room temperature kills nothing; it only firms the surface while the interior of the icing stays a moist protein layer.
- Salmonella riskShell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, within the white and yolk. Cracking two eggs into a bowl and beating them spreads any contamination through the whole batch, and a cake iced this way then sits out for hours at exactly the temperatures bacteria favour.
- Lemon juice is not a controlOne teaspoon of juice in a couple of egg whites lowers the pH only slightly. It is there for whiteness and stability in the foam, not for safety, and it should not be read as a preservative step.
- Sugar is not a control eitherCooked frostings of this era were made safe by hot syrup poured into the whites, or by beating over boiling water. This recipe has neither. Dry sugar beaten into cold whites gives no thermal or water-activity protection at these proportions.
- Who is most at riskCake frosting is served to children, pregnant women, the elderly and the immunocompromised as a matter of course. This is precisely the group for whom raw-egg preparations carry the greatest consequence.
- If you want this icingUse a current royal icing recipe built on pasteurized whites or meringue powder rather than adapting the timings here.
- Reading the original"Pulverized sugar" and "confectioners' sugar" are both powdered sugars, and this book plainly treats them as interchangeable, though the trade sometimes distinguished grades of fineness. Older powdered sugars could be coarser than today's 10X. The quantity is left open because the sugar goes in a spoonful at a time until the icing is stiff and glossy.
Uncooked or "cold" icings like this one were common in household cookery through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and they survive today as royal icing for decorated biscuits and wedding cakes. The technique needs neither oven nor thermometer: anyone could beat whites with a fork and a bowl of sugar, whereas boiled frostings demanded a candy syrup brought to the right thread and poured hot. The lemon juice is the one bit of craft in it: acid helps egg-white foam hold, and it counters the faint yellow cast of the whites. That the food-safety objection went unmentioned reflects the period, since the link between shell eggs and Salmonella was not widely understood or acted on in domestic cooking until much later.