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Apple Snow
Reduce half a dozen apples to a pulp, press them through a sieve, sweeten and flavour them. Take the whites of six eggs, whisk them for some minutes, and strew into them two table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar. Beat the pulp to a froth, then mix the two together, and whisk them until they look like stiff snow. Pile high in rough pieces on a glass dish, stick a sprig of myrtle in the middle, and garnish with small pieces of bright-coloured jelly. Time to beat the snow, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for a medium-sized glass dish.
This is an uncooked egg-white dessert: the whites are whisked raw, folded into cold apple pulp and served without any heat step at all. That is the reason it cannot be recommended today, and it is worth being clear about which parts of the method carry the risk.
- The whites are never cookedSix raw egg whites go into the dish and stay raw. Nothing in the method brings them anywhere near the 71C/160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed, and the finished snow then sits at room temperature on a glass dish while it is garnished and served. Anyone wanting this effect should follow a current recipe built on pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue base.
- Whites are not the safe part of an eggThe old assumption that contamination lives only in the yolk does not hold. Salmonella can be present in the white and on the shell, and separating six eggs by hand transfers shell surface into the bowl repeatedly.
- Volume multiplies the riskA single suspect egg is diluted across the whole bowl, so the chance that at least one of six is contaminated is what matters. Soft, sweet, uncooked dishes of this kind are also the sort most likely to be offered to people least able to tolerate an infection.
- The apple pulp does not helpThe recipe does not specify any heat for the apples, only that they be reduced to a pulp and sieved, and neither its acidity nor the added sugar sterilises anything. The mixture is a nutritious, room-temperature medium.
- Three-quarters of an hour of beatingThe stated time reflects whisking by hand. It also means the mixture spends the better part of an hour standing in a bowl at room temperature before it is ever eaten, which is the opposite of what cold-egg handling requires.
- The myrtle sprigMyrtle appears as a garnish in Victorian dishes of this kind, used for its stiff dark leaves rather than for eating. It is decorative only, and some plants sold as "myrtle" today are unrelated species that should not be treated as food.
- "Probable cost, 1s. 4d."One shilling and fourpence, in pre-decimal British currency -- Cassell's costed almost every entry this way so a cook could budget a dinner. It is a reminder that six eggs and half a dozen apples were a modest, everyday outlay.
Apple snow belongs to a long English family of "snows" and "creams" -- fruit pulp or cream beaten with egg white to a foam and piled up in a glass dish -- found in earlier English receipt books and still on the Victorian supper table. The appeal was architectural as much as culinary: a mass of stiff white froth standing high in rough peaks, spiked with a green sprig and dotted with red jelly, was a showpiece a household cook could produce from apples, sugar and eggs alone. Its close relation, apple fool, uses cream instead of whites. The three-quarters of an hour allotted for beating is the honest measure of what that cost before the electric mixer.