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Ice Cream Icing for White Cake
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
Two cups pulverized sugar boiled to a thick syrup ; add three teaspoons vanilla; when cold, add the whites of two eggs well beaten, and flavoured with two teaspoons of citric acid.
The method here is the hinge and the problem: the sugar syrup is boiled, then cooled completely, and only then are the raw whites folded in. Nothing in the finished icing is ever brought to a temperature that would make the eggs safe.
- Why the egg is the issueIn a true boiled icing, hot syrup at roughly 238-245F is poured in a thin stream onto beating whites, which heats them as it goes. This recipe reverses that order and specifies when cold, so the whites stay raw. Uncooked egg white carries a real risk of Salmonella, and an icing sits at room temperature for hours or days on a cake. If you want a white boiled icing, use a current recipe with an instructed syrup temperature or pasteurised whites.
- Pulverized sugarIn 1877 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, with no anti-caking starch in it. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and behaves differently when boiled into syrup.
- "Boiled to a thick syrup"No temperature and no water quantity are given. Nineteenth-century icing syrups were judged by thread or soft-ball stage, but the original text leaves the reader to guess, which is part of why this cannot simply be followed as printed.
- Two teaspoons citric acidThat is a very large dose of sour salt for two cups of sugar. Citric acid was sold in crystals by the druggist and was reportedly used in small quantities to keep icing from graining and to sharpen flavour; at this quantity the icing would be aggressively tart.
- Three teaspoons vanilla into hot syrupThree teaspoons vanilla -- The vanilla is added to the syrup while it is still hot, and alcohol and some aroma will be lost; that may be part of why the quantity looks generous by modern standards.
- The nameDespite the name, this is not frozen and contains no cream; it is a soft white frosting rather than a hard royal icing.
The Home Cook Book was published in Toronto in 1877, compiled "by ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children, and it stands as one of the earliest and most successful Canadian community fundraising cookbooks. Recipes like this one arrive credited to the contributor by name, which is the whole social logic of the genre: the book is a roll call of local housekeepers as much as a set of instructions. The citric acid is a reminder that the druggist's shelf and the pantry overlapped freely in the 1870s; crystals of citric or tartaric acid were among the household additions available at the time.