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Chocolate Frosting
Mrs. C. H. Wheeler.
Whites of two eggs, one and one-half cups of fine sugar, six great spoons of grated chocolate, two teaspoons of vanilla; spread rather thickly between layers and on the top of cake. Best when freshly made. It should be made like any frosting.
This is an uncooked meringue-style icing, and that is the problem: the egg whites are beaten with sugar and chocolate and spread straight onto the cake without ever reaching a temperature that would make them safe.
- Why it failsNothing here cooks the whites. Raw egg white can carry Salmonella, and sugar and cocoa solids do nothing to control it; unlike a raw egg in a batter, this frosting is eaten exactly as mixed. Use a current frosting recipe instead.
- "Great spoons"An informal 19th-century measure, usually taken as a tablespoon rather than a teaspoon, though the books are inconsistent and this one gives no clue. Six of them of grated chocolate is a genuinely vague quantity.
- Grated chocolateHere this means a hard cake of chocolate, most likely unsweetened, scraped on a grater. It is not cocoa powder and not chips.
- "Fine sugar"Sugar was still often broken from loaves and pounded or sifted, so "fine" here probably means something closer to superfine or lightly powdered sugar, which dissolves in beaten whites without leaving grit.
- "Like any frosting"The instruction assumes the reader already knows the method: whites beaten stiff, sugar worked in gradually, flavouring last. That assumption is why the recipe is three lines long.
- "Best when freshly made"An uncooked white-and-sugar icing crusts and weeps within hours, and it has no keeping qualities and no safety margin.
Egg-white-and-sugar icings were common in American cake recipes through much of the 19th century: they needed no thermometer and no reliable stove, only a strong arm, a bowl, and sugar fine enough to dissolve. Solid baking chocolate came as a hard block that had to be grated, which is what the recipe calls for. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1876) was compiled from contributions by named local women, and this entry is typical of the form: a list of quantities, a flavour note, and the flat assumption that the cook knows the rest.