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Ornamental Frosting II
Whites 3 eggs. 1 tablespoon lemon juice Confectioners' sugar, sifted Put eggs in a large bowl, add two tablespoons sugar, and beat three minutes, using a perforated wooden spoon. Repeat until one and one-half cups sugar are used. Add lemon juice gradually, as mixture thickens. Continue adding sugar by spoonfuls, and beating until frosting is stiff enough to spread. This may be determined by taking up some of mixture on back of spoon, and with a case knife making a cut through mixture; if knife makes a clean cut and frosting remains parted, it is of right consistency.
This is uncooked royal icing: raw egg white beaten with confectioners' sugar and lemon juice, spread on cake and left to dry in air. Nothing in the method ever brings the egg to a safe temperature, and the notes below explain what that means and how to read the rest of the instructions.
- Raw egg is the problemThe whites are never heated at any stage; the icing sets by drying, not by cooking. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and sugar and lemon juice do not make the mixture safe. A current recipe using pasteurized whites or meringue powder should be used instead.
- Drying makes it worse, not betterDrying does not fix it -- An ornamental frosting of this kind sits at room temperature for hours or days while it hardens, then is eaten uncooked. The high sugar and low moisture do not kill anything; any bacteria present in the raw white can survive the drying, which is why modern versions of this icing are usually made with pasteurized whites or meringue powder.
- Who it was served toOrnamental frosting of this kind was the standard finish for wedding cakes and other celebration cakes, so it would have been eaten by whoever was at the table, including groups for whom raw egg carries the greatest risk. Worth knowing before treating the recipe as merely quaint.
- The missing ingredient lineThe printed text begins mid-list, with only the lemon juice and the sugar surviving. An ornamental frosting of this type would call for egg whites rather than whole eggs, despite the direction to "put eggs in a large bowl"; the quantity has been lost with the first line.
- Perforated wooden spoonA slotted or pierced wooden spoon, the tool period books specify for this kind of beating. A stiff spatula does the same work; the frosting is far too heavy for a whisk by the end.
- Case knifeA table knife, not a specialist tool. The test described is the standard one for royal icing: a cut drawn through the surface should stand open with clean walls rather than flowing back together.
- Why the sugar goes in two spoonfuls at a timeWhy the sugar goes in two tablespoons at a time -- Adding it gradually lets each addition dissolve and keeps the whites from being knocked down, which helps give the smooth, hard, opaque finish. The lemon juice contributes acidity and thins the mixture as it stiffens, as well as any flavour.
Ornamental frosting is broadly the American term for what British bakers call royal icing: egg white beaten with sifted sugar until it dries to a brittle, chalk-white shell that can be piped into lattice, shells and lettering. The book gives more than one version -- this is the second -- and a boiled frosting will not hold a piped edge in the same way. Elaborately decorated white cakes were a familiar centrepiece of late-nineteenth-century wedding entertaining. The call for sifted confectioners' sugar is itself a marker of the period: finely milled boxed powdered sugar became widely available in American groceries over the second half of the century, so recipes that had once begun by pounding and sieving loaf sugar by hand could simply specify it. Egg-white icings of this general type are usually traced to earlier English cookery, where whisks were sometimes made up from bundles of twigs.