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Snow, Apple
Take twenty large appples, and bake them till tender enough to draw off the peel; rub them through a tamis; add sugar to taste, pounded cinnamon, and grated lemon-peel. Keep stirring always the same way for a quarter of an hour; beat up the whites of six eggs to a stiff froth, add it, and still keep stirring. Fix a hoop on a sheet of paper, butter it, and pour the snow in; bake in a very cool oven. Apple snow may be iced.
An enormous baked meringue built on apple purée, from the era when a dessert was expected to feed a table of twelve or more. The whole thing hinges on driving moisture out of the apples before the whites go in.
- ScaleTwenty large apples yield a very large quantity of purée, well beyond a modern table's needs. Quartering the recipe (5 apples, and 2 whites rather than the one and a half a strict quarter would give) brings it down to a sensible modern dish; the method is unchanged.
- TamisA tamis is a drum-shaped sieve of woven horsehair or fine cloth. A medium-mesh sieve and a stiff plastic scraper do the same work, as will a food mill; a blender or processor will not, since it aerates the pulp rather than straining out fibre and skin.
- "A very cool oven"By modern reckoning probably somewhere in the region of 200-250F, though the book gives no figure. This is closer to drying than baking — the point is to set the froth and drive off water without colouring it. Allow a long, slow bake, and leave it in the oven as it cools.
- The hoop on paperA flan ring or the collar of a springform pan set on buttered parchment, on a baking sheet. The purée mixture holds its own shape reasonably well, so a cake tin with the sides lined works too.
- The quarter-hour of stirringNot superstition: the long stirring works moisture out of the purée and gives a paste stiff enough to support the beaten whites, though the recipe does not say to do it over heat. "Always the same way" is a direction that recurs in period recipes; direction is immaterial, but gentleness is not.
- Folding the whitesLet the purée cool to just warm before adding the froth, or the whites will deflate on contact. Fold in a third first to slacken the paste, then the rest.
- ApplesChoose a variety that collapses — Bramley, McIntosh, Cortland. A firm modern eating apple such as Gala or Honeycrisp holds its shape more and makes heavier work of the sieve.
- "May be iced"Most likely a sugar glaze finished at the end rather than a poured frosting, though the recipe does not specify what is meant.
Apple snow belongs to a long English family of "snows" — creams and fruit purées whipped with egg white to a froth — that appear in printed English cookery from the sixteenth century onward, and were originally served cold and uncooked, heaped up on a dish. What this recipe gives is a later, grander form: the froth is stiffened with a thickened apple paste, moulded in a hoop and dried in a barely warm oven so it can be turned out and sliced, closer to a meringue gâteau than a fool. Twenty apples and six eggs indicate the scale of the households such books addressed, where a slow-cooling oven could be put to use for hours at a time.