Apple Snow
Four large sour apples, bake and scrape out the pulp and add one-half coffee-cup sugar and the whites of two eggs beaten together for one-half hour, or until it is very light. This is delicious with cake for dessert or for tea.
A two-ingredient froth of baked apple and beaten egg white, served without any further cooking. That last fact is the problem: nothing in the dish is ever brought to a temperature that would make raw egg white safe.
- Why this one failsThe whites are folded in raw and the snow goes straight to the table. Uncooked shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and in the white, and beating does nothing to it. The baked apple pulp is warm at best and cools as it is beaten, so the mixture never approaches the 160F at which egg protein is pasteurised.
- Who is most at riskRaw-egg desserts are specifically advised against for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised — which is much of the audience for a light supper dish like this. If you want apple snow, use a current recipe built around pasteurised egg white.
- "One-half coffee-cup"A coffee cup in an American kitchen of this period is not a standard measuring cup; it runs roughly 6 to 8 fluid ounces, so half of one is somewhere between a third and a half cup of sugar.
- "Sour apples"This means a sharp cooking apple, not a spoiled one; period American kitchens would have had tart varieties such as Greening or Northern Spy to hand, and Granny Smith or Bramley occupy the same place now. Sweet dessert apples give a flat, cloying snow, which is likely why the sourness is specified.
- Baking the applesWhole apples were baked until the skins split and the flesh collapsed, then the pulp was scraped from the shells. Scraping rather than mashing keeps out skin and core fibre, which would show as flecks in a dish meant to look like snow.
- "Beaten together for one-half hour"That half hour is honest labour with a wire whisk or a flat wooden spoon, not an exaggeration. The instruction is really "beat until it will hold its shape," and the volume comes entirely from air, since there is no gelatine, cream or cooked syrup to support it.
- YieldFour apples, two whites and a modest amount of sugar beat up into a large bowl of froth -- a few small servings. The recipe gives no yield, and an unstabilised egg-white froth of this kind will begin to weep and settle fairly soon after beating.
Apple snow belongs to a family of whipped fruit "snows" and "fools" long established in English cookery well before the eighteenth century; the name simply describes the white, drifted look of the finished bowl. American evening tea in the late nineteenth century was a light meal, and a fruit froth served with a slice of plain cake was exactly the sort of thing a household made from windfall apples and the whites left over after using yolks in a custard or a cake. The economy is the point — whites and fruit that was already in the cellar. It was also a dish praised for being wholesome and easily digested, an idea that recurs constantly in the invalid and children's cookery of the era, and one that the modern understanding of raw egg has quietly overturned.