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Yellow Glaze for Cakes
Beat up the white of an egg with four ounces of powdered white sugar, add to it by degrees the strained juice of half a lemon and beat it well, for the more it is beaten the whiter it will be. When it is white enough, add to it a small quantity of strained infusion of saffron. Grate the yellow rind of a lemon on lumps of sugar, or if the flavor of lemon peel is desired, the rinds of two lemons may be used. Scrape off the yellow sugar, pound and beat it in, being careful not to put too much, or the glaze will be bitter.
This is a saffron-tinted royal icing of the old school: raw egg white beaten stiff with sugar and acid, spread on cake and left to dry in air. The technique is sound, the egg is the problem.
- The egg is never cookedThe white goes onto the cake raw and simply dries at room temperature. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and a glaze is often left standing for hours while it sets. A current recipe using pasteurized whites or meringue powder should be used instead.
- Lemon juice does not make it safeThe acid here is for whiteness and texture, not sanitation. Beating acid into raw white lowers the pH a little but is nowhere near sufficient to render the egg safe.
- Standing time compounds itUnlike a raw egg folded into a batter that then goes into the oven, this coating sits on a finished cake and is served without any further cooking.
- "Four ounces of powdered white sugar"Weight, not volume: about 115 g, roughly a cup of confectioners' sugar. Nineteenth-century powdered sugar was sugar ground fine, without the cornstarch modern confectioners' sugar carries.
- Infusion of saffronSaffron steeped in a little hot water and strained, used here mainly as a colorant. It was one of the common yellows before synthetic food dyes, and a very small quantity carries a great deal of color along with a distinct hay-like aroma.
- Rubbing sugar on the zestDragging a lump of loaf sugar across a lemon until it turns yellow captures the peel oil without the pith. The warning about bitterness is real: the oil is potent and the white pith beneath is not.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf from 1893 and the compiler whose name sold this 1896 book, was gathering a working reference for a large hotel kitchen, which is why the volume includes small utility formulas like this one alongside the famous salads and canapés. Glazes of this type—beaten egg white, fine sugar, lemon juice—are generally traced to the eighteenth-century English and French confectioner's tradition, where the same mixture appears as royal icing, glace royale, or simply "iceing for cakes," and where color came from saffron for yellow, cochineal for pink, and spinach juice for green. The trick of rubbing a sugar lump against a lemon rind to take up the oil is older still and is often said to have been common practice for flavoring before commercial extracts were reliable; cookbooks well into the nineteenth century treat it as the ordinary way to get lemon into a sweet dish.