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Apple Snow with Sponge Cake
Put four or five slices of sponge-cake into a glass dish, and pour over them first two table-spoonfuls of sherry and then a cupful of cream. Place in a saucepan five or six finely-flavoured apples peeled and cored, with a little water, sugar, grated lemon-rind, and lemon-juice. Reduce them to a pulp, press the pulp through a sieve, and beat it with the whites of six eggs until it is white and frothy. Heap it over the cakes as high as possible, and serve immediately. Time to beat, about an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
This is a raw-egg dessert: the apple pulp is cooked, but the six egg whites are beaten in cold and the whole thing goes straight to the table. That is the problem, and it is not one that can be timed or tempered away.
- The whites are never cookedSix raw egg whites are beaten into the sieved apple pulp and the dish is served immediately. Nothing in the method brings them near the 71C/160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed.
- Volume raises the stakesSix eggs divided among five or six portions means about a whole raw white per person. If one egg carries Salmonella, every serving is contaminated. It is also a soft, sweet, uncooked dish of a kind that may be given to children and the elderly, who are least able to shrug off an infection.
- Cream and sherry do not steriliseThe cupful of cream poured over the sponge is not heated either, and the two tablespoonfuls of sherry are nowhere near enough alcohol to make any antimicrobial difference. Neither element compensates for the raw whites.
- What to do insteadIf you want apple snow, use a current recipe that specifies pasteurised egg white or a cooked meringue. This is not a matter of adjusting a temperature in the original text, so no adjustment is offered here.
- Reading the old textFor context rather than practice: "probable cost, 2s. 6d." is two shillings and sixpence, a substantial sum for a pudding and a reminder that cream, sherry and six eggs were not casual purchases. "Time to beat, about an hour" reflects hand-whisking, not any property of the mixture.
- Sponge-cakeThe base assumed a plain, dry, fatless sponge of the kind kept in the house for trifles, which soaks up sherry and cream without collapsing. A modern buttery sponge or shop cake behaves quite differently under liquid.
Apple snow belongs to a long English family of "snows" and "froths" -- fruit pulp or cream lightened with beaten egg white and piled high -- that appear in cookery books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward, when whisking whites to a foam was one of the few ways of getting air into a dish. Cassell's version is the late-Victorian dressed-up form: the plain snow is set on sponge cake soaked in sherry and cream, which is essentially trifle logic applied to a lighter topping, and the glass dish exists so the layers can be seen. The instruction to beat for about an hour suggests a household where someone could be spared for the whisking; mechanical rotary beaters were in circulation by this date but were far from universal in British households. Recipes of this kind may also have used up egg whites left from custards and rich sauces, which took the yolks.