Apple Float
Mash a quart cooked or coddled apples smooth through a sieve; sweeten with six tablespoonfuls sugar, and flavor with nutmeg. Then add the apples, a spoonful at a time, to the whites of four eggs, well beaten. Put a pint of cream, seasoned with sugar and nutmeg, at the bottom of your dish, and put the apples on top.--Mrs. I. H.
A cold apple snow of the older sort: sweetened apple pulp folded into raw beaten whites over a pool of cream. The eggs are never cooked at any stage, which is where the recipe fails for a modern kitchen.
- The eggs are never heatedThe apple pulp is cooked, but it is added a spoonful at a time to raw beaten whites and the finished float is served cold. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs survives into the dish.
- Why whites are not a safe exceptionRaw whites are often assumed to be harmless because the yolk carries most of the risk, but contamination can be present in the white as well, and the sugar and apple offer no antimicrobial effect at these levels. If the assembled float is left to stand at room temperature, any organisms present have hours to multiply.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg desserts are specifically contraindicated for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised.
- The creamA pint of raw or lightly handled cream sitting under the apple would not have been unusual in the period. Modern pasteurised cream removes that particular hazard, but it does not make the raw whites acceptable.
- If you want to make an apple snowUse a current recipe written for pasteurised egg whites or a cooked meringue base. Do not adapt this one by eye.
- Reading the original"A quart cooked or coddled apples" most likely means a quart of the pulp once cooked rather than the raw fruit, though the wording is ambiguous; six tablespoonfuls of sugar is three-eighths of a cup. "Coddled" here simply means stewed gently in a little water until soft.
- YieldA quart of apple pulp, four whites and a pint of cream makes a large bowl, well beyond a dessert for four; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Apple float belongs to the family of frothed dessert creams — snows, whips, fools and floating islands — long standard at the cold end of an English and Anglo-American dinner. All of them depend on beating egg white or cream into volume by hand, and the results were prized for looking like snow, clouds or froth on the table. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited to some 250 Virginia and Southern housekeepers, is full of these attributed one-paragraph receipts signed with initials, and the assumption behind "Mrs. I. H.'s" instructions is a household with its own eggs, its own cream, and apples to work through.