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To Ice Pastry
To ice pastry, which is the usual method adopted for fruit and sweet dishes of pastry, put the white of an egg on a plate, and with the blade of a knife beat it to a stiff froth. When the pastry is nearly baked, brush it over with this, and sift over some powdered sugar; put it back into the oven to set a glaze, and in a few minutes it will be done. Great care should be taken that the paste does not catch or burn in the oven, which it is very liable to do after the icing is laid on.
This is a finishing technique rather than a dish: a thin meringue-like glaze brushed on pastry near the end of baking. The whole thing hinges on timing, since sugar over egg white will scorch faster than the crust beneath it.
- When to apply"Nearly baked" means the closing minutes of the bake, when the crust is set and coloured but not yet finished; the recipe gives no timing beyond "a few minutes". Applied earlier, the glaze weeps and slides; applied at the very end, it stays chalky rather than glossy.
- Beating on a plateA knife blade on a flat plate produces a small amount of stiff, dense froth. A fork in a shallow bowl does the same job; a mixer may whip in more air than is wanted here, giving a foamy, bubbled surface.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period this usually means ordinary sugar crushed and sifted fine, closer to modern caster sugar than to today's confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster sugar dissolves cleanly into the egg white; icing sugar works but sets to a more opaque, matte finish.
- Oven heatReturn the pastry to the same heat it was baking at; the recipe specifies no temperature. Do not raise the temperature to hurry the glaze.
- The burning warning is realSugar on a wet egg-white film browns within a minute or two at pastry heat. Stay at the oven door and pull the pastry the moment the surface turns glossy and faintly golden; a rack shifted to the middle of the oven helps if the top is close to the element.
- QuantityOne egg white, frothed, goes a long way; the recipe assumes a single white will serve. Leftover white keeps covered in the refrigerator but will need re-beating.
- Where it suitsBest on fruit pies, jam tarts and turnovers, where the sugar crust plays against tart filling. On a savoury pie use plain beaten whole egg or yolk and milk instead, with no sugar.
Egg-white-and-sugar glazing was standard practice in nineteenth-century English pastry work, and instructions like these circulated through the household manuals of the period; compilers borrowed freely from one another. The technique belongs to a kitchen where a cook judged doneness by eye at the oven mouth, which is why the warning about catching and burning takes up so much of the entry: with a coal range there was no way to lower the heat quickly, only to remove the pie. The result is the ancestor of the sugared, crackly lid still expected on a fruit pie, though most modern recipes reach it more simply by brushing with milk or beaten egg and scattering sugar before the pie goes into the oven at all.