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Frosting
Beat whites of two eggs to a stiff froth, add gradually half pound best pulverized sugar, beat well for at least half an hour, flavor with lemon juice (and some add tartaric acid, as both whiten the icing). To color a delicate pink, use strawberry, currant or cranberry; or the grated peeling of an orange or lemon moistened with the juice and squeezed through a thin cloth, will color a handsome yellow. This amount will frost one large cake. -Mrs. W. W. W.
This is a raw-egg-white icing of the type later called royal icing, and the eggs are never heated at any point. The notes below explain the terms and why the method has been abandoned.
- Why this fails todayThe whites are beaten with sugar and spread on a cake without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the frosted cake then sits at room temperature for a day or more. Sugar and acid slow bacterial growth but do not sterilise; a modern recipe using pasteurised whites or meringue powder should be used instead.
- Best pulverized sugarNineteenth-century "pulverized" sugar is a fine-ground sugar roughly between today's superfine and confectioners' sugar, and without the cornstarch modern confectioners' sugar contains. Long beating would have helped dissolve such a sugar, though the recipe gives no reason for the half hour.
- Half an hour of beatingA long hand-beating time of this kind is usual in the period, whether with a whisk, a broad-bladed knife or a rotary beater. Part of it goes to dissolving undissolved sugar crystals and part to building the foam; the recipe does not say which.
- Tartaric acidSold loose by druggists and grocers at the time and used, like cream of tartar, as an acidulant in icings. The recipe's own claim is that it whitens the icing.
- Fruit colouringStrawberry, currant and cranberry juice give a pink that is not stable, and any watery juice loosens the icing. The citrus-peel method described here squeezes colour and peel oil out through the cloth rather than adding bulk liquid.
- Half a pound of sugarRoughly 225 g, which against two whites of some 60-70 g is around three-and-a-half parts sugar to one part white by weight.
Uncooked icings of beaten white and fine sugar were common in American household books through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) belongs to the wave of regional compilations built from contributed recipes, which is why this one carries initials rather than an author's name. The suggestion of tartaric acid to whiten reflects a period preference for pure white cake surfaces. Boiled and cooked frostings, in which hot syrup is poured over the whites, were also known by this date and became more common later, partly because they hold up better and partly because they cook the egg.