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Glace Vanilla
Place four ounces glazed sugar in a small enamelled pan, adding an egg white and a teaspoon vanilla essence; place pan on range and stir with wooden spoon while heating for five minutes, or until lukewarm, and use as required.
This is a poured sugar icing (glace) of the plainest kind, but its single binder is raw egg white warmed only to lukewarm — a temperature that does nothing to make it safe. The notes below explain the terms and the problem.
- Why it failsThe white is held at "lukewarm" for five minutes, which is squarely in the range where Salmonella multiplies rather than dies. Egg protein needs sustained heat well above blood temperature to be made safe, and this icing is then spread on a finished cake or pastry and eaten without further cooking. Use a current royal-icing or glace-icing recipe instead.
- Glazed sugarNot a modern term. It most likely means the finely powdered sugar used for icing — what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar. Four ounces is roughly one cup, loosely packed.
- Enamelled panProbably specified to avoid reactive metals such as bare copper or iron, which can discolour egg white. Any non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled — answers the same purpose.
- On the rangeThe range is a coal or gas stove top, which gives less low, controlled heat than a modern burner or double boiler.
- Vanilla essenceEssence is the concentrated flavouring, broadly equivalent to modern vanilla extract. A teaspoon to four ounces of sugar is a firm hand by current taste.
- YieldThe original gives none. Four ounces of sugar with one white makes a small quantity of thin glaze, enough for a single small cake or a few buns.
Glace is the French word for a glaze or ice, and in professional kitchens it covered everything from a thin sugar wash brushed over buns to the stiff white coating on a wedding cake. This entry belongs to the shortest and driest genus of cookbook writing: the working note, set down for a cook who already knows what consistency a glace should be and needs only the proportions and the flavouring. Uncooked or barely warmed egg-white icings were long-standing practice — the egg white was valued for the hard, glossy set it gives as it dries in air rather than for anything heat does to it — and the health risk they carry was not generally understood until food microbiology caught up with them in the twentieth century.