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Apple Snow
Take 2 cups of apple sauce cooked as dry as possible. Press through sieve and sweeten. Add the white of 1 egg beaten stiff, and beat briskly. Heap in a dish and heap whipped cream around it or boiled custard.
A three-ingredient dessert whose whole structure rests on one uncooked egg white, which is where the problem lies.
- The egg white is never cookedThe stiffly beaten white is beaten into sieved, sweetened apple sauce and the dish goes to the table as it is. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the sugar and apple acid do not substitute for heat. If you want apple snow, use a current recipe that addresses the egg.
- The cream and custard do not helpWhipped cream heaped around the dish is also raw, and a boiled custard poured beside the snow cools long before it could affect the egg white in the centre. The garnishes are separate from the mixture, not a treatment for it.
- Nor does the beating"Beat briskly" is a texture instruction. Aerating a mixture spreads any contamination through it evenly rather than reducing it, which is why raw-white desserts of this type have become uncommon in modern books.
- Why the sauce must be dryFor interest rather than practice: "cooked as dry as possible" is the hinge of the original. Wet apple sauce will not hold air, and the snow slumps.
Apple snow belongs to a family of "snow" dishes that runs back at least to the seventeenth century, when cooks whipped cream, egg whites and rosewater into a froth and piled it over a rosemary sprig or a loaf to make a mock snowball. By the Victorian and Edwardian period the froth had migrated to sieved fruit purees, and apple, being cheap and plentiful, was among the common bases. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed with sacks of flour to Canadian households, is full of exactly this kind of thrift: two cups of leftover apple sauce, one egg, and a dessert appears. Recipes of this sort persisted in print for decades after the invention of the icebox.