Apple Snow
Apple Snow may be made in two ways, using either the cooked or uncooked apples. For the uncooked grate a medium-sized tart apple (peeled, grated, and set aside). Whip stiff the white of one egg with a pinch of salt, then add, gradually, three tablespoons of sugar, beating well into the egg, alternating with the grated apple, a tablespoon at a time, till all the apple and sugar are used, then continue to whip until the "snow" has risen to at least a pint and a half in quantity, for it will swell surprisingly. If the cooked apple is used, observe the same proportion, the white of one egg to the pulp of each apple. Chopped dates or nuts may be added or fresh, grated cocoanut. The "snow" may be served as it is, or quickly and lightly browned.
APPLE CHEESE (Cake or Tart Filling) To a pound of sugar add one-fourth pint of water and onehalf pound of apples-peeled, cored, and quartered and the grated rind of one lemon. Cook for three hours then add the juice of the lemon, boil for ten minutes, stirring continually, then removing. Use this as a filling for tarts or cake or with nuts as sandwich filling.
Two recipes share this page: an uncooked apple snow built on raw egg white, and an apple cheese, which is a long-boiled fruit paste. The notes below apply to the second; the first cannot be recommended as written.
- Why the snow failsThe uncooked version is raw egg white, whipped and served without heat. Salmonella in shell eggs is a real risk in a dish eaten cold, and the optional "quickly and lightly browned" finish colours the surface without bringing the interior anywhere near a safe temperature. If you want apple snow, use a current recipe built on a pasteurised or cooked-meringue base.
- The cooked variant is not a fixCooking the apple pulp does nothing for the egg, which is still whipped in raw at the end. The proportion given, one white to the pulp of one apple, describes the same uncooked-egg dish with a softer fruit.
- Apple cheese: the unitsOne-fourth pint is half a cup of water. A pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; half a pound of apples is roughly two medium apples once peeled and cored, so this is a sugar-dominant paste rather than a sauce.
- Apple cheese: what three hours meansThis is a slow reduction over very low heat in a heavy pan, not a rolling boil, and it wants stirring and scraping toward the end as it thickens. At that sugar ratio it will scorch on a thin base long before three hours are up.
- DonenessThe finish is a stiff, translucent paste that holds a line when a spoon is drawn through it, closer to quince paste than to jam. The lemon juice added for the final ten-minute boil supplies the acid that helps it set, and it firms further as it cools.
- Coconut and other additions"Cocoanut" is simply coconut; fresh grated, as specified, is far wetter and less sweet than the sweetened dried flake sold today.
- StorageApple cheese keeps refrigerated in a covered jar for a couple of weeks. This recipe gives no processing instructions, so do not treat it as a shelf-stable canned preserve.
"Snow" dishes are among the oldest sweets in the English repertoire, recorded from the sixteenth century onward as whipped cream or egg white heaped over fruit, and the apple version was a common one in Victorian and Edwardian household cookery, turning one apple and one egg into a dish that filled a large glass bowl. The "cheese" in apple cheese has nothing to do with dairy: it is the old English term for a fruit pulp boiled with sugar until it is stiff enough to slice or spread, the same sense preserved in damson cheese and in the surviving quince cheeses of Spain and Portugal.