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Confectioners' Frosting
1 egg-white
½ teaspoon vanilla
½ cup confectioners' sugar
Beat the egg-white stiff and add the sugar gradually; continue beating until the mixture is smooth and light. Add flavoring.
A two-ingredient uncooked icing of the kind that was standard before egg safety was understood. The problem is the egg, and it is not fixable by adjusting the method.
- The egg is never heatedNothing in this recipe brings the white above room temperature, and the frosting is spread on cooled cake and eaten as is. Salmonella in shell eggs is not confined to the yolk, and a beaten raw white spread over a cake and left standing on a sideboard for hours is a textbook situation for it.
- Sugar does not make it safeHalf a cup of sugar to one white is far too dilute to inhibit bacterial growth — heavy sugar preservation depends on very high concentrations and low water activity. This mixture is mostly foamed egg white with sugar dissolved in it.
- What to use insteadLook up a current recipe. Modern equivalents of this icing are built on pasteurized liquid egg white or meringue powder, or they are cooked, as in a boiled or Swiss meringue. Any of those routes belongs in a recipe written with them in mind rather than grafted onto this one.
- On the ratio, for referenceEven setting the egg aside, half a cup of confectioners' sugar per white is very little by later standards; royal icing of the same family runs closer to two cups per white. The original would have given a soft, slack glaze rather than an icing that sets firm enough to pipe.
Uncooked confectioners' frosting was the quick alternative to boiled icing in American household books of the early twentieth century: no thermometer, no sugar syrup taken to the soft-ball stage, just a white beaten stiff with powdered sugar stirred in. Its rise depended on the wide availability of very finely milled sugar, sold as confectioners' or XXXX sugar and cut with a little starch, which dissolved in cold egg white where granulated would not. Raw egg in icing was unremarkable until the late twentieth century, when Salmonella enteritidis in shell eggs became a documented public health problem and cookbooks began specifying pasteurized whites or cooked meringues in its place.