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Banana Snow
Two bananas mashed, white of one egg, juice of one lemon, and half a cup of powdered sugar beaten together until like snow.
— Mrs. L. B. Banker
A one-line uncooked fruit foam of the sort that filled the dessert pages of turn-of-the-century community cookbooks. It cannot be recommended today, because the egg white is eaten raw.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whole method is beating uncooked white into a foam and serving it cold; nothing in the recipe brings the egg above room temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and inside the intact egg, and a whipped, unheated foam holds it happily for as long as the bowl sits out. This is the specific reason the dish fails, not a general caution about eggs.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg desserts are exactly the class of food that public-health guidance singles out for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised.
- No acid rescueThe lemon juice is there for flavor and to keep the bananas from browning. Acid at this level does not pasteurize anything, and it should not be read as making the egg safe.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe that specifies a pasteurized egg product or a cooked meringue; we are not going to retrofit times and temperatures onto a nineteenth-century line of prose.
- Reading the measurementsFor the record, "powdered sugar" in books of this period usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today, and "beaten until like snow" means stiff and holding its shape. The recipe gives no yield.
"Snow" was a standing category in American and English dessert cookery long before this book, covering anything beaten pale and light with egg white — apple snow being the great survivor, with lemon, prune and banana variations following as the ingredients became available. Bananas are the tell here: by the 1890s steamship lines and railroads had made them a comparatively cheap and reliable fruit well inland, and they turn up in church and village cookbooks in exactly this way, folded into an existing formula rather than given dishes of their own. The recipe's brevity and its attribution to Mrs. L. B. Banker are consistent with a community or subscription cookbook, where contributors wrote down what they already knew by heart.