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Frozen Apple Snow
Make as for Apple Snow, adding for each pint of snow one pint of mixed milk and cream and a trifle more sugar. THE CHAPTER II THE PEAR (Pyrus communis: Malaceӕ) HE Pyrus communis, or common pear, ranks close to the apple in point of family, of abundance, latitudinal range and general utility. The wild pear grows throughout Europe and Asia, its branches thorny; its small, hard fruit not considered edible. But from very early times the bristling little wild tree or bushy shrub has taken kindly to cultivation. The Greeks and Romans seem to have availed themselves of this susceptibility and the legions of the latter introduced the pear into Britain. Whether grafted on quince, the mountain ash (the rowan), or wild pear stock, it flourished and now the vast majority of pears do not deserve the epithet "insipid" even yet not infrequently applied by the thoughtless who judge all by the few exceptions or by those pears intended by nature for cooking only. There are stores of riches in the grape sugar contained in this fruit, in its proportion of iron, in its moderate per cent. of malic, tannic, and tartaric acids, its albumen, lime, pectin, mucilage, and its relatively large proportion of potash and phosphoric acid and toothsome juiciness, the quantity and pure quality of which last "distilled water," should tempt one to make up for the water one should but which one does not drink copiously enough in simple form. Such general mildness of tonic properties agrees with almost any type of stomach and the laxative quality has a properly stimulating effect upon the intestines.
The pear may be used in almost as many forms and in very much the same manner as the apple (see "The Apple" for all desired recipes not found under "The Pear," or adapt to other fruit recipes).
A two-line variation that depends entirely on the preceding recipe, and that dependency is the problem: apple snow in this period is peeled apple pulp beaten stiff with raw egg white and sugar, and freezing it does nothing to make the egg safe.
- Why it failsThe base is never heated. Apple snow in this period is normally built on uncooked egg whites whipped into sweetened apple pulp (the base recipe is not reprinted here), and this version simply freezes that mixture with milk and cream. Freezing suspends bacterial growth but does not kill Salmonella; a still-frozen or partly thawed custard-less ice can carry it through to the table.
- The dairy adds to the risk, not to the safetyA pint of mixed milk and cream is stirred in cold. There is no cooked custard stage in the procedure, so the egg white and the dairy never pass through a pasteurising temperature.
- If you want the dishUse a current frozen-dessert recipe built on a cooked base or on pasteurised egg white. That is the sensible route; this text should be read rather than followed.
- Reading the measurementsA pint is two cups, and the ratio given is one to one — equal volumes of finished snow and of mixed milk and cream, with sugar increased by an unspecified "trifle." No yield is stated.
- The text that followsEverything after the first sentence is the opening of the next chapter on the pear, caught in the same block of type. It is not part of the recipe and contains no instructions.
"Snow" desserts are an old English family — apple snow, lemon snow, snow cream — generally built on egg white beaten to a stiff froth, or in some cases on whipped cream, and lightened with fruit pulp or sweetening, and they appear in British and American cookery books long before the eighteenth century and on through the nineteenth as a cheap, showy way to end a meal without a custard or a pastry. The apple version made particular sense in a household with a barrel of winter fruit in the cellar: a few baked or stewed apples, sieved, would carry a great deal of air. Freezing it, as here, belongs to a later moment, when the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer and commercially delivered ice had become ordinary in middle-class American kitchens and almost any cold sweet could be recast as a frozen one. The surrounding book is organised by fruit rather than by course, which is why a frozen dessert sits in a chapter called "The Apple" and why the author cross-references the pear chapter back to it — the apple is treated as the standard against which the other pome fruits are measured.