Home › Directions For Frosting › Chocolate Frosting
Chocolate Frosting
Six rounded table-spoons grated chocolate, one and a half cups powdered sugar, whites of three eggs; beat the whites but very little (they must not become white), add the chocolate, stir it in; then pour in the sugar gradually, beating to mix it well.-In the Kitchen.
This is an uncooked meringue-style frosting: raw egg white is the only binder, and nothing in the method brings it to a temperature that would make it safe.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten briefly, then mixed with chocolate and sugar. There is no cooking step at any point, so Salmonella present on or in the shell egg survives into the finished frosting. Sugar and cocoa solids do not inactivate it.
- Not the same as a cooked icingBoiled icings beat a hot sugar syrup into the whites, and Swiss meringues heat whites and sugar together over water, in both cases to roughly the 160F range generally cited as safe for eggs. This formula neither beats the whites stiff nor heats them at all, so it has none of that protection.
- Who is most at riskFrosting spread on a cake is typically served to a whole table, including children, older guests and anyone pregnant or immunocompromised, which is exactly the group for whom raw-egg dishes are advised against.
- What the ingredients meant then"Grated chocolate" in a book of this period means a hard cake of chocolate grated by hand, most likely unsweetened, rather than modern cocoa powder or chips; "powdered sugar" of the period was generally finely ground sugar, without the cornstarch added to modern confectioners' sugar.
- If you want this flavourUse a current chocolate frosting recipe, either butter-based or one that heats the whites to temperature. Do not attempt to adapt this one by eye.
The Dixie Cook-Book, like most late nineteenth-century American compilations, borrowed freely from earlier books, and the credit line "In the Kitchen" is generally taken to point to Elizabeth S. Miller's 1875 volume of that name rather than to an original contributor. Raw-egg-white icings were common in the period: beaten whites and sifted sugar were, by most accounts, the whole technology of frosting before meringue, buttercream and, later, refrigeration became widely available. Chocolate arrives here as a grated solid because that is how it was sold, in unsweetened cakes. The instruction that the whites "must not become white" is the telling detail, and it may be that a barely broken white keeps the icing dark and glossy rather than pale and foamy, an appearance that would have mattered a great deal on a plain layer cake.