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Apple Snow
Pare, core and bring to boil in as little water as possible six tart apples, cool and strain, beat well and add the well-whipped whites of three eggs, sweeten to taste and beat thoroughly until a dish of snow is the result, flavor with lemon or vanilla, or add the grated rind of a lemon; serve with sweetened cream. Or, make custard of yolks, sugar, and a pint milk, place in a dish, and drop the froth on it in large flakes. - Mrs. T. J. Buxton, Minneapolis, Minn.
The dish is a raw-egg-white foam folded into apple purée, and that is the problem: nothing in it is ever heated after the whites go in. The notes below explain the reading of the old wording and where the recipe fails.
- The whites are never cookedThe apple pulp is boiled and then cooled, so the beaten whites are folded into a cold base and served as is. There is no step at any point that brings the egg to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the mixture then sits at room temperature while it is beaten to a snow and served. A current recipe, using pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue method, should be used instead.
- The custard variation does not fix itMaking a custard of the yolks, sugar and a pint of milk does cook the yolks, but the froth dropped on top is still uncooked white. The dish remains a raw-egg preparation whichever version is followed.
- "Strain" means sieve the pulp"Strain" here most likely means pushing the boiled apples through a sieve to give a smooth pur he is is to remove skin fragments and fibre so the foam stays light.
- Six tart applesA firm, sharp cooking apple rather than a modern sweet dessert variety; six of them come to perhaps 2 lb of fruit. Modern dessert apples are sweeter and would need less of the sugar the recipe leaves to taste.
- "As little water as possible"Just enough in a covered pan to keep the fruit from catching before its own juice runs. Presumably a wet pur he e would not hold air well.
- A pint of milkAn American pint, 16 fl oz, for the custard variation. The three yolks left over from the whites make a thin pouring custard rather than a set one.
- "Sweetened cream"Plain liquid cream with sugar stirred in, poured over at table, not whipped; the recipe uses "whipped" explicitly when whipping is meant, as with the egg whites.
- YieldSix apples and three whites make a large bowl, probably enough for four to six as a light dessert. A foam of this kind will start to weep fairly quickly, so it is best beaten and served without delay.
Apple snow belongs to a long English line of "snows" and "whips" — fruit pulp or sweetened cream beaten to a froth with egg white — that appear in printed cookery from at least the sixteenth century onward and were still standard parlour desserts in nineteenth-century America. They were popular for exactly the reason this version is: they turn cheap winter storage apples and a few eggs into something that looks extravagant, and they use no oven, no gelatine and no ice. The second form given here, froth dropped in flakes over a thin custard, is the same idea as the older floating island, where the yolks go into the custard and the whites onto the surface so that nothing is wasted. That thrift is characteristic of Buckeye Cookery, a book compiled from contributions by Ohio and Midwestern housekeepers, whose recipes are credited by name — here Mrs. T. J. Buxton of Minneapolis — and whose whole organising principle was economy in the kitchen.