Prune Snow
This is made as for Prune Soufflé but served at once, uncooked.
A one-line recipe that leans entirely on the Prune Souffl eserved prunes beaten into whipped egg white wo dishes: the baked souffl e, and this, the same mixture eaten raw. That distinction is the whole problem.
- Why this one cannot standThe souffl e version is set in the oven; this version is never heated at all. Uncooked egg white can carry Salmonella, and nothing in the method brings it to a temperature that would deal with it. A modern recipe for fruit snow, built around pasteurised whites, should be used instead.
- The recipe is incomplete on its ownThe whole method rests on the Prune Souffle entry, which must supply the prune preparation and the proportions; cross-references of this kind are common in cookery books, and an isolated page like this one is only half a set of instructions.
- Prunes then and nowDried prunes of this period were generally sold to be soaked, stewed, then stoned and sieved. Today's moist pitted prunes are a different product and may behave differently in a puree, giving a looser paste that supports beaten white less well.
- "Served at once" is literalA raw fruit snow begins to weep before long, as sugar draws liquid out of the foam and the puree sinks. The instruction reads as practical rather than merely polite.
- Sieving mattersAny skin or fibre left in the prune pulp can tear the foam as it is folded. A hair sieve was the period tool; a fine mesh strainer, or a blender followed by a strainer, does the same job.
"Snow" was a familiar nineteenth-century name for a dish lightened with beaten egg white and eaten cold, though the name covered cream-based versions too; apple snow is the oldest and best known, and appears in English cookery books well before prunes joined the family. When prune versions arrive is less certain. A prune is simply a dried plum, and the two were often treated as one subject. The pairing of a baked souffle and an uncooked snow from a single mixture also shows the period's habit of economy in print: one set of proportions, two dishes, four words of instruction.