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A Nice, Plain Dessert
Peel and slice the apples, stew till done, then run through a colander and sweeten, season. Beat the whites of three eggs to a stiff froth, and just before serving whip them into a quart of the stewed apples. Eat with cream.--Mrs. T.
A quart of sweetened apple pulp lightened with raw beaten egg white and served cold with cream. The apples are cooked; the eggs never are, which is where this recipe fails for a modern table.
- Why the cautionThree raw egg whites are folded into the apple pur he the dish is served immediately, "just before serving." Nothing in the method brings the whites anywhere near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella, and unlike a meringue or a soufflé there is no oven stage afterwards. Use a current recipe if you want an apple fool or a snow.
- The purée was likely still warmThe purée may still have been warm -- The recipe does not say whether the stewed apple was cooled, and warm fruit can give the false impression that the whites are "cooked" as they are whipped in. Brief contact with warm fruit does nothing of the kind.
- QuantitiesA quart of stewed pulp is roughly 4 cups, which would need something like 3 lb of apples before peeling and coring. The recipe gives no number of servings.
- "Sweeten, season"Vague, as receipts of this period often are. Nineteenth-century cooking apples were generally sharper than a modern Gala or Fuji. What the seasoning was is not stated; nutmeg, cinnamon or lemon peel would all be plausible.
- Run through a colanderThis is a sieve instruction, not a drain. The stewed apple is pushed through the perforations with a wooden spoon to leave skin fragments and fibre behind — a food mill or coarse sieve does the same work.
- "Eat with cream"Cream is called for but not specified; nothing indicates it was whipped. Cream in 1879 would have been raw and unhomogenised, another reason the dish as a whole belongs to a different food-safety era.
Apple snow — sweetened apple pulp beaten up with egg white until it holds a pale froth — is often said to have been a long-standing dish in English and American cookery, and it was in any case a plain sort of dessert: no crust, no custard, no baking, and no cost beyond fruit already in the cellar. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why this one arrives signed only "Mrs. T." and with the offhand brevity of a note passed between cooks who already knew what to do.