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APPLE CREAM (another way)
Boil six or seven large apples, with a little cinnamon, to a pulp, with sufficient sugar to sweeten them; the quantity of sugar must be regulated by the acidity of the apples. When cold, add to them the well-whisked whites of three eggs. Beat all together until they are nicely frothed; then serve, heaped on a dish. Time to beat, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for a small side-dish.
This is the dish usually called apple snow, and it is finished raw: whisked egg whites are folded into cold apple pulp and served without any further cooking. That is the one step that puts it out of reach today.
- The eggs are never cookedThe whites go into apple pulp that is already cold, and nothing afterwards raises the mixture above room temperature. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that Victorian cooks did not know about and could not have controlled; the acid in the apple does not eliminate it. Anyone wanting apple snow should follow a current recipe written with that in mind.
- Standing time makes it worseThe recipe says only "then serve, heaped on a dish," but a frothed dish of this kind would have been set out and eaten at ambient temperature, which is the condition under which a raw-egg foam becomes a problem.
- A quarter of an hour of beatingThat timing belongs to a hand whisk, and it applies to the whole mixture: the whites are whisked first, then beaten into a heavy fruit pulp. It tells you how much air the finished dish was expected to hold, not how long any modern appliance would need.
- Sugar to taste, by designThe instruction to regulate sugar by the acidity of the apples is doing real work, since apple varieties vary widely in sharpness and no fixed weight of sugar would suit all of them.
- Probable cost, 8dCassell's gives a "probable cost" in pence for its recipes, a habit aimed at cooks working to a household budget. Eightpence here covers a small side-dish made from apples, a little sugar and three egg whites.
Apple snow belongs to a family of English "snows" and "froths" that goes back at least to the seventeenth century, when cooks whipped cream or whites with fruit pulp or wine to build a white mound on a dish. By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s the dish appears in something close to this form: cheap apples cooked down with cinnamon and sugar, lightened with whites, and sent up as a side dish rather than a formal sweet. A second version follows -- this is headed "another way" -- which suggests the book was cataloguing variants rather than prescribing a single method, and the pence-per-dish costing at the end reflects a readership of household cooks answerable to a weekly account book.