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Almond Frosting
Blanch half pint sweet almonds by putting them in boiling water, stripping off the skins, and spreading upon a dry cloth until cold; pound a few of them at a time in a mortar till well pulverized; mix carefully whites of three eggs and three-quarters pint powdered sugar, add almonds, flavor with a tea-spoon vanilla or lemon, and dry in a cool oven or in the open air when weather is 'pleasant.
This is a raw-egg-white icing set by drying rather than by heat, and that is the part that has not aged well. The notes below explain the historical measures and terms, and why the method itself is no longer sound.
- Why it fails todayThe whites of three eggs are never heated to any pasteurizing temperature. A "cool oven" and open-air drying leave the icing well under 160F throughout, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs survives in the finished frosting, which is then eaten uncooked on top of a finished cake.
- Drying is not cookingAir-drying reduces surface moisture but does not sterilize. A sugar-and-egg-white mixture this wet, held for hours at room temperature or in a barely warm oven, sits in the range where bacteria multiply rather than die. If you want an almond icing, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or meringue powder.
- Half pint of almondsMeasured by volume, not weight: about a cup of whole blanched almonds, roughly 5 oz. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks measure nuts, sugar and flour this way as a matter of course.
- Three-quarters pint powdered sugarAbout a cup and a half, near 6 oz. Period "powdered sugar" was loaf sugar crushed and sieved at home; it contained no cornstarch, so it behaved slightly differently from modern confectioners' sugar.
- Sweet almondsThe word sweet is doing real work. Bitter almonds, sold in the same era for flavouring, contain amygdalin and release hydrogen cyanide; they are not sold as food in the United States today. Any almond in a modern shop is the sweet kind.
- A cool ovenIn this period the term means a fire dying down rather than a measured setting, a low holding heat generally reckoned at somewhere around 200 to 250F and used for drying meringues and kisses rather than baking. It is a holding temperature, not a cooking one, which is the crux of the problem above.
- Pounding in a mortar"A few at a time" is the instruction because a loaded mortar turns almonds to oily paste rather than powder. The same caution applies to a food processor, where the nuts go to butter within seconds of going to meal.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the large family of late nineteenth-century American compilations that grew out of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, reissued and re-regionalized for different markets, and its frosting chapter reflects a moment when cakes were routinely finished at home with nothing but egg white and sugar. Almond icing sits at the point where two older traditions meet: the English almond paste laid under royal icing on fruit cakes, and the French practice of grinding blanched almonds into sweetmeats. Blanching by scalding and slipping the skins was ordinary kitchen work in a household that bought almonds whole, since shelled and skinned nuts kept badly once their oils were exposed. The direction to dry the frosting "in the open air when weather is pleasant" is a reminder that these kitchens had no reliable low oven and no refrigeration, and that a great deal of confectionery depended on choosing a dry day.