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Peach Snow, or Peach Foam
Make as for Apple Snow. Either fresh or canned fruit may be used. Flavour the sugar and egg with almond or rose flavouring and have all of the ingredients ice cold before mixing. Crush or pulp the fruit instead of grating.
This is a variation instruction rather than a standalone recipe: it points back to Apple Snow, which is raw egg white beaten stiff with sugar and raw fruit pulp and served without any cooking. That structure is the problem.
- The egg is never cookedA snow is nothing but beaten raw egg white, sugar and fruit, whipped cold and eaten cold. Nothing in the method brings the white above room temperature, so Salmonella present in or on the shell egg survives intact into the finished dish. Modern practice does not serve uncooked shell egg in this way, and the recipe as written offers no step that would change that.
- "Have all of the ingredients ice cold"The instruction is there because cold whites and cold pulp hold a stiffer foam. Chilling slows bacterial growth but does not kill anything: there is no heat step, and peach pulp is not acidic enough to do the work that lemon does in some old fruit fools, so any Salmonella present in the raw egg survives into the finished dish.
- Almond flavouringIn books of this period "almond flavouring" may mean bitter almond essence or oil of bitter almonds, which carries cyanogenic compounds and was sold at strengths not intended for a spoonful of anything. Modern almond extract is a different product. If you meet the phrase in an old fruit book, treat it as an unknown quantity of an unknown preparation.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a fruit snow or fruit fool, written with a safe egg product or with cream, rather than adapting this text.
- What the original is describingFor context only: apple snow in this period was commonly grated raw apple folded into a meringue-like foam of whites and sugar (the text's "instead of grating" implies as much). The peach version substitutes crushed or pulped fruit, fresh or from the can.
- Rose flavouringThis most likely means rose water, a standard pantry flavouring well into the twentieth century and still sold. It is generally far weaker than modern concentrated rose essences, so old recipes tend to call for larger quantities; check the strength of whatever you have.
"Snow" as a dessert name goes back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cookery, where whipped egg white and cream were heaped over a rosemary sprig set in a loaf or apple to look like a snow-laden bush; by the Victorian and Edwardian period it had settled into the simpler apple snow found in many household manuals, a cheap sweet requiring no fire. The explicit permission to use canned fruit reflects the ready availability of commercially canned fruit by the time the book was written. Flavouring stone fruit with almond or rose reflects an older confectioner's taste.