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Apple Snow--No. 2
Reduce half a dozen apples to a pulp; press them through a sieve, sweeten and flavor them. Take the whites of 6 eggs, whisk them for some minutes, and strew into them 2 tablespoonfuls 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-colored jelly. Time to beat the snow, three-quarters of an hour.
A Victorian whipped-egg dessert that is assembled cold and never cooked at any stage. The apple pulp is the only cooked element; the six egg whites go to the table raw.
- Raw egg white is the problemSix unheated whites are folded in and served straight from the bowl. Salmonella can be present on shell and in the white, and nothing in this method — beating, sweetening, chilling — reduces it. Whipping for three-quarters of an hour at room temperature only gives any contamination time to multiply. Use a current recipe if you want this dessert.
- Why it was safe enough then and not nowMany nineteenth-century households had access to eggs of known and recent origin, and a dish like this would generally have been eaten soon after making. Modern supply chains, longer storage and pooled handling change the calculation; commercial pasteurised whites are one response to the risk.
- Not a baked puddingNothing here sees an oven. The whole thing is a cold froth piled on a dish, closer to a fool or a syllabub than to a pudding.
- Three-quarters of an hour of beatingThat timing assumes hand beating. It reflects the labour of the period rather than anything the mixture requires.
- Sifted sugarMost likely sugar passed through a sieve to break lumps, closer to modern caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch.
- The myrtle sprigCommon myrtle was used as a table garnish in this period, valued for its glossy leaf and its associations with weddings. It is decoration, not seasoning, and should not be confused with periwinkle or other unrelated plants sold as "myrtle".
Apple snow belongs to a family of whipped-egg-white confections — snows, fools, syllabubs and creams — that appear on English tables from the sixteenth century onward, and the name is simply descriptive: beaten white piled up in rough drifts. Its appeal lay in volume achieved without cream or gelatine, at a time when a cook's arm and a bowl were the only aeration available, which may be why the instruction ends with a stated beating time rather than a doneness cue. The numbering as "No. 2" indicates simply that the book prints more than one version of the dish. The finishing touches — the sprig of myrtle, the scattered points of bright jelly — reflect a Victorian taste for desserts arranged as much for the eye as the palate.