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Apple Snow Frosting
Take white of one egg, unbeaten, grate one small apple into it, add 1 C sugar, mix all together, and beat until very stiff, so it stands alone. Mrs. B. H. Whitman.
This is an uncooked meringue-style frosting: raw egg white, raw grated apple and sugar, beaten stiff and spread on cake. Nothing in it is ever heated, which is why it cannot be recommended today.
- The egg white is never cookedSalmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk of a shell egg, and beating with sugar and apple does nothing to reduce it. A frosting like this sits at room temperature on a cut cake for hours, which is the condition in which any bacteria present multiply fastest. Cooked meringue and royal icing methods exist precisely because of this; a current recipe using pasteurised whites or a heated syrup should be used instead.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg white is a specific hazard for young children, pregnant women, adults over 65 and anyone immunocompromised. When this was written the risk was neither understood nor traceable; today it is both.
- The raw apple adds to the problemGrated apple brings moisture and surface microorganisms into a mixture that will never be heated. It is another uncooked ingredient in an uncooked frosting, not merely a flavouring.
- "1 C" and the appleFor reference, the abbreviation means one cup of sugar, roughly 7 oz if granulated. "One small apple" is genuinely vague, and the volume of liquid it releases is what determines whether the mixture stiffens at all.
- Why the beating is so longUnbeaten white plus sugar and wet fruit is a hard mixture to aerate, and "stands alone" implies a long beating; a foam carrying that much fruit moisture is unlikely to hold indefinitely as the apple weeps. Even setting safety aside, it is not a frosting that keeps.
- YieldOne white and a cup of sugar makes a small quantity, enough to top something on the order of a single 8-inch layer or a small loaf cake.
Uncooked "snow" frostings turn up often in American community cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a stiff white icing was the mark of a well-dressed cake and few home kitchens had a thermometer for boiled-sugar work. Apple snow itself is older than the frosting: an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English dessert of grated or stewed apple beaten into egg white and piled in a glass, which crossed into American books and then, as here, migrated from the dessert chapter to the icing chapter. Church and parish collections like the Libertyville Presbyterian book, to which the recipe is attributed, circulated exactly this sort of contribution, which assumed the reader already knew what a properly beaten white looked like. The apple supplied the flavour.