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Icing (Following rules should be)
The following rules should be observed where boiled icing is not used :- Put the whites of your eggs in a shallow earthen dish, and allow, at least, a quarter of a pound or sixteen tablespoons of the finest white sugar for each egg. Take part of the sugar at first and sprinkle over the eggs; beat them for about half an hour, stirring in gradually the rest of the sugar; then add the flavour. If you use the juice of a lemon, allow more sugar. Tartaric acid and lemon juice whitens icing. It may be shaded a pretty pink with strawberry juice or cranberry syrup, or coloured yellow by putting the juice and rind of a lemon in a thick muslin bag and squeezing it hard into the eggs and sugar.
If cake is well dredged with flour after baking, and then carefully wiped before the icing is put on, it will not run and can be spread more smoothly. Put frosting on to the cake in large spoonsful, commencing over the centre; then spread it over the cake, using a large knife, dipping it occasionally in cold water. Dry the frosting on the cake in a cool, dry place.
This is an uncooked egg-white icing — the book itself sets it against "boiled icing," which is heated. Because nothing here ever reaches a safe temperature, the notes below explain the problem rather than adapt the method.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten with sugar, spread on a finished cake, and then simply left to dry in a cool place. Salmonella in shell eggs is destroyed by heat, and sugar and beating do nothing to it; a boiled or cooked-meringue icing reaches temperature, this one does not. Use a current royal icing recipe built on pasteurized whites or meringue powder.
- Drying in a cool, dry placeAn egg-white glaze left to air-dry only forms a crust; underneath it stays soft and moist. The iced cake then stands at room temperature, which is the opposite of what raw egg calls for.
- Acid does not make it safeLemon juice and tartaric acid are called for here as whiteners, and that is all they do. Neither is present in enough quantity, or for long enough, to be a meaningful control on pathogens.
- "Finest white sugar"This most likely means sugar ground fine at home or bought as a powder, with no cornstarch in it, though the phrase can also simply mean the best-quality refined sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains starch, which changes both the texture and the way the icing sets, and is not a like-for-like substitute.
- A quarter pound is not sixteen tablespoonsA quarter pound and sixteen tablespoons -- Four ounces of granulated sugar is closer to nine or ten tablespoons, so the two measures only match if the sugar is a light powdered one: sixteen tablespoons is a full cup, and a cup of powdered sugar runs roughly four ounces. Read as powdered sugar, the intent is about a cup per white.
- Half an hour of beatingThis is a hand-whisk instruction from a kitchen without an electric mixer. Modern royal icing comes together in a few minutes, and thirty minutes of machine beating would only dry and over-aerate it.
- The flour trickDredging the baked cake with flour and wiping it off was a way of drying and de-crumbing the surface so the icing would not slide. A thin cooked crumb coat does the same job now and does not leave raw flour on the cake.
The Home Cook Book (compiled from contributions by "ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns") belongs to the era when a cake was iced with one of two things: a boiled icing, in which hot syrup cooked the egg whites, or this uncooked sort, beaten cold and left to harden in the air. The cold version is effectively what English cookery came to call royal icing, a name generally traced to its use on grand ceremonial and wedding cakes, where a stiff white shell that dried hard was the whole point. The colouring notes are a good snapshot of the period: a cook reached for strawberry juice or cranberry syrup for pink and squeezed lemon rind through muslin for yellow, the oil from the zest doing double duty as flavour and tint.