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Yellow Frosting
The yolk of one egg to nine heaping tea-spoons pulverized sugar, and flavor with vanilla. Use the same day it is made. -Mrs.
This is an uncooked frosting built on a raw egg yolk, and that is the whole problem with it. The notes below explain the terms and why the recipe does not survive into a modern kitchen.
- Raw yolk, never heatedNothing in this frosting is cooked. The yolk goes onto the cake raw and stays raw, so any Salmonella present in the egg is still present when the cake is eaten. Sugar alone does not pasteurise anything at these proportions.
- "Use the same day it is made"The recipe gives no reason for this, and period same-day instructions often concern the icing drying out or weeping rather than spoilage. Either way, a day at room temperature on a cake is ample time for bacterial growth; the instruction reduces the risk rather than removing it.
- Who eats frostingUncooked-egg dishes are riskiest for children, older adults, pregnant people and anyone immunocompromised, which is a fair description of most of the people who get given cake. If you want a yellow icing, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg or on butter and colouring.
- Pulverized sugarNineteenth-century pulverized sugar is finely ground sugar, roughly what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar, though the period product was usually ground without the cornstarch modern boxes contain.
- Nine heaping tea-spoonsA heaping spoonful is not a fixed quantity, and period teaspoons were not standardised, some running smaller than the modern 5 ml measure. The recipe does name a number, but in practice the amount would come down to how much sugar one yolk will carry before the mixture stiffens.
- YieldOne yolk and this much sugar makes a small quantity, likely no more than a thin coat for a single small cake rather than enough to fill and cover a layer cake.
Frosting chapters in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks divide between boiled icings, where sugar syrup is cooked to a thread and beaten into egg white, and raw icings like this one, which are just sugar worked into egg until stiff. The white-of-egg version is far more common in print; a yolk gives colour without dye, though the recipe itself says nothing about why it was chosen. Subscription cookbooks of this era commonly gathered contributions from named local women, which would explain why the recipe trails off into an attribution rather than a method.