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Apple Snow
1 large sour apple 3/4 cup powdered sugar Whites of 2 eggs Boiled custard Peel and grate the apple, sprinkling the sugar over it as it is grated to keep it from turning dark. Add the unbeaten whites of the eggs; beat constantly for half an hour; arrange moundfashion on a glass dish with cold boiled custard around it. STRAWBERRY TRIFLE No. 1 1 cup mashed strawberries 1 cup powdered sugar Whites of 3 eggs Boiled custard Make and serve like Apple Snow.
STRAWBERRY TRIFLE No. 2 Stale cake 1/2 cup milk 1 egg Sugar to taste 1/4 teaspoon vanilla 1 pint cream 1 cup crushed strawberries Line the bottom of a glass dish with slices of stale cake, and pour over them a boiled custard made from the milk and egg, sweetening to taste and flavoring with vanilla. Whip the cream; mix with the strawberries and pile over the custard, decorating the top with a few whole berries.
Three linked desserts from the same page: two "snows" built on raw egg white, and a proper trifle. The first two cannot be recommended today, but the page is still worth reading for what it says about beaten-white desserts and for the third recipe, which is sound.
- Why the snows failApple Snow and Strawberry Trifle No. 1 are raw egg white, whipped with fruit and sugar and served cold with no cooking step at any point. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and in the white, and half an hour of beating at room temperature is incubation, not a kill step. Use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites if you want this style of dessert.
- The custard is not the risk"Boiled custard" here means a stirred milk-and-egg custard cooked on the stove until it coats a spoon, then chilled. That part is heated. It is the uncooked meringue mounded in the middle that is the problem, so cooking the custard longer does not rescue the dish.
- Strawberry Trifle No. 2 is the makeable oneStale cake, a boiled custard from 1/2 cup milk and 1 egg, whipped cream folded with crushed berries. Everything egg-based is cooked. Note that one egg to half a cup of milk gives a very thick custard by modern standards; it is meant to soak the cake, not to pour.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1900"Powdered sugar" -- American books of this period often used the term for a finely milled granulated sugar rather than today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. For Trifle No. 2, where sugar is simply "to taste," either works; the distinction would have mattered most in the snows, where the sugar had to dissolve in cold fruit.
- A large sour appleA tart cooking apple; a modern cook would reach for a Granny Smith or Rhode Island Greening. The sugar sprinkled over the gratings is doing real work: it draws juice and slows the browning that grated apple begins within a minute or two.
- Half an hour of beatingIt reflects how much air had to be forced into unbeaten whites diluted with wet fruit pulp.
- ServingEach of the three is a glass-dish dessert, meant to be seen through the side of the bowl.
"Snow" desserts run back through eighteenth-century English cookery, where apple, lemon or quince pulp was beaten with white of egg until it held a peak and then piled up to look like a drift of snow, sometimes around a sprig of rosemary. They belong to the long era before mechanical refrigeration when a cold sweet had to be made light by muscle rather than by freezing, and they persisted in American household books well into the twentieth century. The pairing with a thin "boiled custard" poured around the base is strongly associated with American, and particularly Southern, cookery; the same custard, poured over stale cake instead, is the trifle that follows it here.