Apple Snow
Core and pare two large apples and grate into a bowl containing half a cup of powdered sugar, add the white of an egg and beat with an egg beater until the mixture is light and stiff. Serve in champagne glasses and decorate with candied orange peel and cherries.
A cold uncooked foam of grated apple, sugar and raw egg white. The technique is straightforward; the problem is that nothing in it is ever heated.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whole dish is served cold and uncooked, so the egg white is eaten raw. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and inside the egg, and beating it into sugar and fruit does nothing to reduce that. This is the reason the recipe should not be made as printed; use a current recipe for apple snow if you want the dish.
- Who is most at riskRaw-egg desserts are a particular hazard for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised — exactly the audience a light fruit dessert tends to be served to.
- Powdered sugarIn American books this generally means a finely ground sugar; by the twentieth century the term commonly stood for confectioners' sugar, often cut with a little cornstarch. A fine sugar dissolves without grit in a cold uncooked mixture, though the recipe itself gives no reason for the choice.
- Grated apple browns fastNo acid is called for. Grated apple oxidises within minutes, and the recipe has you grate directly into the sugar and beat at once rather than preparing anything ahead.
- Champagne glassesProbably the coupe-style glass, wide and shallow, holding on the order of four to six ounces. The recipe gives no yield.
- The handwriting on this pageA previous owner of our copy wrote a Cocoa Whipped Cream recipe onto this page by hand; it was not part of the printed book.
Apple snow belongs to a long family of English "snows" — fruit pulp beaten into egg white until it holds a cloud-like shape — that appear in cookery books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward, and were originally whisked by hand with bundles of twigs or rushes. By the time this book was printed the rotary egg beater had made the dish quick: a dessert that requires no oven and no cooking at all, assembled in minutes and served in stemware. The standards of the era did not generally treat a raw egg white as a risk worth naming.