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Apple Filling for Cake
Make as for Apple Snow, using one egg, one apple, and one cup of sugar. Also, for variety, the yolk of the egg may be added, the whole heated carefully till it thickens.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone method: it sends you back to the book's Apple Snow, which is grated raw apple whipped into raw beaten egg white with sugar. The problem is that nothing in the first version is ever cooked, and the variation offers no temperature or time.
- Raw egg white, never heatedRaw egg, never heated -- the base method this sends you back to, Apple Snow, is an uncooked foam of egg white, sugar and apple. Salmonella in shell eggs is a surface and interior risk that only heat removes, and a sweet, moist filling held at room temperature is a hospitable medium. There is no step in the first version that brings the egg anywhere near a safe temperature.
- The cooked variation is unmeasured"the yolk of the egg may be added, the whole heated carefully till it thickens" gives neither a temperature nor a time. A custard-style filling needs to be held at a measured temperature; "carefully" is not a specification. Use a current recipe for a cooked egg filling.
- Proportions are guessworkOne apple is not a unit, and apple size varies widely. One cup of sugar to a single egg is also extremely sweet by present taste, closer to a stiff sugar paste than a froth.
- Why the texture fails anywayApple sheds a great deal of juice, and an uncooked meringue lightened with it weeps as it stands. Even setting the egg aside, this is not a filling to make ahead.
Apple snow belongs to a family of "snow" dishes that ran through English and American cookery for centuries, into the early twentieth: fruit pulp or juice beaten into egg whites until white and mounded, sometimes piled around a whipped-cream base, sometimes served plain in glasses. They were cheap, dramatic and required nothing but a whisk and patience, which is part of why they persisted in household manuals. Books of this kind routinely recycled one preparation across several headings, so a snow becomes a filling, and the reader is told simply to "make as for" something a few pages back.