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Cakes To Make Icing for Cakes
or Beat the whites of two small eggs to a froth, then add to them a quarter of a pound of white sugar, ground fine like flour, flavor with lemon extract vanilla, beat it until it is light and very white, but not quite so stiff as kiss mixture; the longer it is beaten the more firm it will become. No more sugar must be added to make it so. Beat the frosting until it may be spread smoothly on the cake. This quantity will ice quite a large cake over the top and sides.
This is a plain uncooked royal-style frosting: raw egg white beaten with finely ground sugar and no heat at any stage. The vocabulary is worth decoding even though the method is not one to follow.
- Why it fails todayThe egg whites are never heated, and the finished icing sits on the cake at room temperature for hours or days. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and in the white, and sugar alone does not make the mixture safe. For an uncooked icing, use a current recipe built on pasteurised whites or meringue powder.
- "White sugar, ground fine like flour"This is confectioners' or icing sugar, which was often made at home by pounding and sifting loaf sugar. A quarter of a pound is about one cup of modern powdered sugar, though commercial versions now contain cornstarch as an anti-caking agent.
- "Kiss mixture"Kisses were the small baked meringues of the period, beaten to a stiff peak that holds its shape on the pan. The instruction is telling you to stop short of that, at a consistency that still spreads.
- "Flavor with lemon extract vanilla"The original text appears garbled here; the sense is most likely "lemon extract or vanilla," meaning a few drops of one or the other.
- On the beatingThe note that more sugar will not stiffen the icing is sound and still worth knowing. In a sugar-and-white foam, firmness comes from working air into the protein; extra sugar past saturation makes the mixture heavy and grainy, not stiff.
- YieldTwo small egg whites and four ounces of sugar make a modest quantity of icing; the recipe claims it will cover the top and sides of quite a large cake. Modern layer cakes with thick frosting need several times this.
Uncooked egg-white frostings like this one appear widely in American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, as refined white sugar became cheaper and could be bought or pounded fine enough to dissolve in a raw white. Earlier icings were often set in a cooling oven or over a chafing dish; this one relies on beating alone. The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a large family of books aimed at newly married women setting up a first household. The insistence on "light and very white" reflects a period taste in which whiteness signalled good sugar and patient labour, and the warning that more sugar will not substitute for more beating is the kind of practical correction that recurs across these manuals.