Apple Snow
INGREDIENTS for moderate sized dish.-6 large apples, the whites of 6 eggs, the rind of 1 lemon, 6 oz. of Peel, core and cut the apples into quarters, and put them into a saucepan with the lemon-peel, and sufficient water το prevent them from burning, about pint. When they are tender, take out the peel, beat them into a pulp, let them cool, and stir them to the whites of the eggs, which should be previously beaten to a strong froth. Add the sifted sugar, and continue the whisking until the mixture becomes quite stiff, and heap it on a glass dish. The dish may be garnished with preserved barberries or strips of brightcoloured jelly, and if liked a dish of custard may be served with it, or some whipped cream. castor sugar. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
TIME. From 30 to 40 minutes to stew the apples.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
The text as printed is garbled — the ingredient line breaks off at "6 oz. of" and the words "castor sugar" have drifted to the bottom, so the sugar is 6 oz. of caster sugar. The larger problem is structural: the beaten whites are never cooked.
- Raw egg white is the whole dishThe apple pulp is left to cool before the whites are stirred in, and nothing afterwards raises the mixture above room temperature. Six raw whites are whisked to a froth, folded in and heaped on a glass dish to be served cold — conditions under which Salmonella present in or on the egg is not destroyed. Whites carry lower risk than yolks but are not sterile.
- No step reaches a safe temperatureThere is no baking, no scalding of the sugar into a syrup, no bain-marie. Whisking generates negligible heat. A dessert of this construction needs a current recipe written around a pasteurised product or a cooked meringue method; this one offers no such step.
- Served with more raw dairyThe suggested accompaniments compound it — a cooked custard is fine, but cream of the period would have been unpasteurised.
- Quantities that read oddly todaySix large apples to 6 oz. sugar and six whites gives a very lightly sweetened, very airy mass; the cooking apples used were sharper than modern dessert varieties, and the sugar was doing work that dessert apples do not require.
- "Sufficient water... about pint"A fraction has evidently been dropped in printing before "pint"; the instruction itself is only enough liquid to keep the fruit from catching in the pan.
- Preserved barberriesThe garnish has largely vanished from British kitchens. Berberis vulgaris was cleared from farmland over a long period because it hosts black stem rust of wheat, and its tart red berries — used in the period as a preserve and garnish — are now mostly a specialist import, usually dried, from Iranian grocers.
Apple snow belongs to a long English family of "snows" — fruit pulp or cream beaten with egg white to a white froth — that goes back well before Mrs Beeton to the sixteenth-century "snow" served heaped around a rosemary sprig to suggest a snow-covered tree. By the 1860s the form had settled into the version here: stewed apple, whipped whites, sugar, piled high in a glass dish so the height and whiteness were the point. It was cheap theatre; the whites may well have been what remained after yolks had gone into a custard, and the custard duly reappears as the suggested accompaniment. The seasonality note — August to March — marks the working life of stored English cooking apples in a period before cold storage and imported fruit made apples a year-round item.