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Baked Apples with Cocoanut Dressing
4 large apples, cored 1/2 cup butter 1 orange 1 cup powdered sugar 3 tablespoons cream 2 eggs, whites only 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut Bake apples until soft and use either hot or cold. Beat butter with sugar, add cream, whites of eggs stiffly beaten, strained juice of oranges and cocoanut. Fill into the centers of the apples.
The baked apples are unremarkable; the dressing is the problem. It is an uncooked butter-and-sugar cream bound with raw beaten egg white and spooned into apples that may already be cold.
- The raw egg white never gets heatedThe whites are beaten stiff and folded into a cold mixture that is served as is — the apples are baked separately and the filling is added afterward, explicitly "hot or cold." Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the recipe was written before that risk was understood in shell eggs.
- It sits at room temperatureA butter, sugar, cream and egg-white mixture holds at ambient temperature while the apples are filled and served. That is precisely the window in which egg-borne bacteria multiply, and warm apples make it worse rather than better.
- If you want to make itUse a current recipe for an uncooked meringue-style filling, one built on pasteurised egg whites or a cooked sugar syrup. We are not going to supply timings that would imply the original method is now sound.
- "Powdered sugar" in this periodIn American cookbooks of this era powdered sugar frequently means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today; the two were not always distinguished in print, so the intended product cannot be settled from this recipe alone.
- Dromedary CocoanutA branded packaged shredded coconut. Whether the tin was moist and sweetened or dry and plain affects the result: with a sweetened product the dressing is very sweet indeed, and a dry unsweetened desiccated coconut would give a coarser, drier filling.
- ScaleHalf a cup of butter, a cup of sugar and a cup of coconut is a great deal of filling for four cored apples; it would make far more than the cavities could hold, so a heaped mound rather than a neat plug seems to be intended.
Dromedary was a brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for packaged dates and shredded coconut, and its recipe booklets were advertising in the shape of a cookbook — every page finds another use for the product in the tin. Baked apples were already a fixture of plain American cookery, cheap and forgiving, so dressing them up with coconut and an uncooked orange-flavoured butter cream was a way of moving a homely dish into the dessert course. The uncooked egg-white filling belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century "boiled" and unboiled frostings and fillings that treated raw whites as an ordinary lightening agent; the practice persisted in print for decades before egg-safety guidance caught up with it.