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Cranberry Snow
Make as for Apple Snow, beating in the berries substituted in the form of strained sauce. Serve with a simple "float."
This is a shorthand entry: it sends you to the book's Apple Snow, which is raw egg white whipped stiff with sugar and beaten full of fruit pulp, then piled up and served with a thin boiled custard poured round it. The substitution is straightforward, but the base dish is an uncooked-egg preparation and that is where it fails today.
- Raw egg white, never heatedA snow is nothing but egg whites, sugar and fruit pulp beaten cold. Nothing in the method brings the whites anywhere near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the finished dish then stands at room temperature while it is piled and served. Meringue-based cold desserts are now made with pasteurised whites or with a cooked sugar syrup beaten into the whites; a current recipe should be used for the base.
- The "float" is a second egg problemThe "float" is a second egg matter -- a float in books of this period generally means a thin soft custard of milk, yolks and sugar poured around or under the dish, sometimes with a spoonful of whipped white floating on it. This recipe gives no method or temperature for it at all, so a modern custard recipe with a thermometer should be used.
- "Strained sauce" here means cooked cranberry pulpCranberry sauce in these books is berries boiled with sugar and water until they burst, then pressed through a sieve to leave the skins behind. It is the pulp, not whole berries, that goes in; whole cranberries will not beat into a foam and their skins tear it down.
- Why cranberry behaves differently from appleCranberry pulp is wetter and more acidic than apple pulp, and excess liquid slackens a beaten white. The recipe's one stipulation is that the berries go in as strained sauce rather than whole.
Snows are an old English dessert form; sixteenth-century versions are a "snow" of cream and egg white whisked with a bundle of rosemary twigs and heaped over a loaf or an apple to look like a snow-covered tree. By the nineteenth century the cream had often dropped out of the American version and the dish had shrunk to whites, sugar and fruit pulp -- cheap, quick, and requiring no ice. Cranberry was being grown commercially on Cape Cod bogs through the second half of the century, and cookbooks of the period take it well past the Thanksgiving sauce into jellies, tarts, ices and confections like this one. The "float" served with it is the thin boiled custard elsewhere called a boiled custard or a floating island sauce.