Apple Float
Stew one quart dried apples until perfectly tender, flavor with extract of lemon and sweeten, spread on a flat dish to cool, mash fine with a silver fork; beat the whites of eight eggs very light and add to the apple after thoroughly mixing; turn into a glass dish and eat with sweetened cream.
Apple float belongs to a family of nineteenth-century "floating" desserts built on raw beaten egg white, and that is exactly where it fails today. The points below explain the hazard and the period details around it.
- The eggs are never cookedEight raw whites are folded into apple that has already been spread out and cooled, and the dish goes straight to the table. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the acidity and sugar of stewed apple do not substitute for heat.
- The quantity magnifies the riskEight whites is a large number of shells cracked into one bowl. A single contaminated egg contaminates the entire dish, and the volume here means the pooled risk is far higher than a recipe using one or two eggs. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised should not eat uncooked egg in any quantity.
- The cream compounds itThe cream adds to it -- "sweetened cream" poured over at the table may well have been unpasteurised when this was written, which would have added a second uncooked animal product to a dish with no kill step. Cream sold today is pasteurised, so the raw white remains the hazard.
- It is served and held coldIt is served cold and unchilled -- the recipe gives no instruction to refrigerate or to serve immediately, and any time a raw-egg foam spends at room temperature is the classic condition for bacterial growth.
- What to do insteadIf you want this dessert, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or a cooked meringue. We are not offering a corrected version of this one.
- Reading the originalA quart of dried apples is a dry measure of the fruit before stewing, not a quart of finished sauce; dried apple takes up water and swells considerably as it stews. "Extract of lemon" is lemon extract, an alcohol-based flavouring, not juice. A silver fork avoids the discolouring that carbon steel of the day caused in acidic fruit.
Floats, snows, and "apple snow" were a standing feature of American supper tables from the mid-nineteenth century, and they suited the evening meal in many households, which was a light, cold spread, where a bowl of whipped fruit foam with a pitcher of cream fitted better than a baked pudding. Dried apples are the giveaway that this was a winter and early-spring dish, made from fruit strung up or spread on racks after the autumn harvest and stewed back to life months later. The technique -- fruit pulp lightened with beaten white -- is generally traced to English snows and whips, which were themselves a way of making a small amount of fruit go a long way and of showing off a cook's arm before mechanical beaters were common. Recipes of this kind gradually fell out of general use, though no single cause accounts for it.