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Orange Frosting
1 grated orange rind A tablesoon orange juice 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice 2 egg yolks Confectioners' sugar To grated rind add fruit juice. Let stand 15 minutes; strain, and add slowly to beaten egg yolk. Stir in confectioners' sugar to spread. 1/2 lb. pulverized sugar Confectioners' sugar.
This is an uncooked frosting built on raw egg yolks, and nothing in the method ever heats them. That is the whole problem with it.
- Raw yolks, never heatedThe yolks are beaten and thickened with sugar only; there is no cooking, no double boiler, no hot syrup. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the yolk itself, and sugar and citrus juice do not inactivate it. Use a current recipe for orange buttercream, or a cooked/pasteurised-egg frosting.
- Why the acid does not helpA tablespoon of orange juice and half a teaspoon of lemon juice, diluted through half a pound of sugar, leaves the mixture nowhere near acidic enough to be antimicrobial. The citrus here is for flavour, not safety.
- It then sits outA frosting like this is spread on a cake and would typically be held at room temperature rather than chilled, which is the condition under which any contamination can multiply. The risk is not a single moment but the whole life of the cake.
- "Pulverized sugar"The two sugar lines are the same thing: pulverized sugar is the period name for confectioners' or icing sugar, and half a pound is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups sifted. The instruction to stir in sugar "to spread" suggests the half pound was an outside figure and the working quantity was judged by consistency.
- The macerating stepSteeping the grated rind in the juice for 15 minutes and then straining is the one genuinely good idea here: it pulls the rind oils into the liquid and leaves no fibrous specks. The technique is worth borrowing for a frosting made by a safe method.
Uncooked frostings of egg and sugar were a common domestic icing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the alternative was a boiled sugar syrup that demanded a thermometer or a reliable hand at the thread stage. A raw yolk gave colour, richness and body with no fire at all, and yolk-based orange and lemon icings turn up here and there in community and manufacturer cookbooks of the period. The confidence about raw eggs is often said to reflect a household closer to its egg supply than most are now; the modern understanding that Salmonella can be present inside an intact, clean shell egg belongs to the later twentieth century, and it is what retires recipes like this one.