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QUINCE SNOW (for Dessert)
Take some fine fresh quinces, and boil them till tender. Peel, cut them into slices, and mash them. Weigh out an equal quantity of sugar. To every pound of quinces, take the whites of three eggs beaten up, and add them one after the other, turning always the same way. After each addition, add also a spoonful of sugar. Continue beating till the whole is white and frothy: the longer it is beaten the better the snow will be. Spread it upon wafer-paper in any shapes you please, and let the snow dry in the sun.
This is a raw-egg-white confection that is never cooked at any stage — the quinces are boiled, but the whites are folded in afterwards and the finished mixture is set out to dry in open air. That is the problem, and it is not one that a change of timing fixes.
- The eggs are never heatedThe beaten whites go into mashed fruit that has been boiled, peeled, sliced and weighed, and the mixture is then dried rather than baked. The recipe specifies no heating step after the whites go in, so any Salmonella present in the shell or white cannot be assumed to have been killed. Modern uncooked meringues rely on pasteurised whites or a hot sugar syrup; neither exists here.
- Sun-drying is an incubatorSun-drying is a risk -- Hours of open-air drying can hold a moist, protein-rich mixture at warm temperatures at which bacteria can multiply, and the surface is exposed to insects and airborne contamination on food that will never be cooked afterwards.
- No acid or sugar barrier you can count onQuinces are tart and the sugar load is heavy — pound for pound with the fruit — but the whipped whites dilute both and trap air throughout. There is no measured pH or water activity here, so the preservation is guesswork rather than a controlled cure.
- Wafer paperThe "wafer-paper" of the period is a thin edible starch sheet of the kind still sold for cake decoration. It is not the difficulty with this recipe, but it is worth knowing the term is not figurative.
- If you want the resultFruit snows and dried meringue shapes are still made, and a current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked syrup method should be used instead. Do not adapt these proportions and assume the rest follows.
Quinces were a kitchen staple long before they became a curiosity, valued less for eating raw -- they are hard and astringent until cooked -- than for the pectin and perfume they release when stewed. The recipe belongs to the sugar and dessert work of a household confectioner, who was expected to turn fruit pulp into shapes, pastes and "snows" for the dessert course that closed a Victorian dinner. Beating fruit pulp with whites and sugar until it lightens is related to the older English fruit snow; drying in the sun rather than in an oven avoided lighting and feeding a range for hours. The instruction to turn "always the same way" is received kitchen lore of the period, and appears to reflect a belief about not knocking air back out of a beaten white rather than any documented chemistry.