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Apple Cream
Peel and core six large apples; boil in a small quantity of water until they can be strained or pressed through a sieve. Sweeten to taste and beat the whites of six eggs; mix with the apples; put in a glass dish and serve with cream poured over them.
This is the dessert usually called apple snow, and the whole structure of it depends on six egg whites that are never cooked. That is the problem.
- The eggs are never heatedThe whites are beaten and folded into sweetened apple pulp, spooned into a glass dish, and served cold under cream. Nothing in the method brings them anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella in egg white and on shell fragments is reliably killed.
- Volume makes it worseSix whites is a large quantity of raw egg for a single uncooked dish, and the risk scales with the number of eggs pooled together: one contaminated egg contaminates the whole bowl.
- Warm pulp does not cook themIf the strained apple is still warm when the whites are folded in, it is nowhere near hot enough to pasteurise egg white, and may simply hold the mixture at a temperature where bacteria can multiply. Chilling afterwards slows growth but kills nothing.
- The cream is a second problemThe cream is poured over raw, and in the period such a recipe was written it may well have been unpasteurised. The recipe gives no timing for how long the assembled dish may stand, which matters for a raw egg-and-dairy sweet.
- If you want this dessertUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg whites or a cooked meringue base. Do not adapt the instructions above.
Apple snow and its close relations — apple cream, apple float, apple fluff — appear in English and American household books from the eighteenth century onward. The appeal was visual: the sweetened purée and stiff whites together produce a pale, aerated mass that mounds up in a glass dish. There may also have been an element of thrift, since a cook who had used yolks for a custard or a cake had whites to account for. Such dishes became less common in general cookbooks over the twentieth century, and versions that survive today are generally made with cooked or pasteurised whites or with gelatine.