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Whipped Apple Sauce
1 cup apple sauce White of 1 egg Grated nutmeg Beat the egg very stiff, alone and then with the apple sauce; add more sugar if necessary; serve in a sherbet glass, sprinkling a little grated nutmeg over the top.
This is a version of apple snow, and the egg white in it is never cooked at any stage — it is beaten raw, folded into cold apple sauce, and served immediately in a glass.
- The raw egg white is the problemNothing in the method applies heat. The apple sauce is cold or at best room temperature, and even warm sauce would not bring a folded-in foam anywhere near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella. The dish depends on the foam staying light, so heating it would destroy it anyway.
- Why 1900 was less worriedWhy the period was less worried -- The risk that concerns us now, Salmonella enteritidis inside an intact, clean-looking shell, was not understood until much later. Cookbooks of the period call for raw whites in snows, floating islands and frostings without comment.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg white is a particular hazard for young children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised — which is precisely the audience a light invalid dessert like this was often made for.
- If you want to make apple snowUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white, either in-shell pasteurised eggs or carton whites labelled for raw use. Do not adapt the timings or quantities here.
- About the apple sauce itselfThe recipe assumes the sauce is already sweetened (it says only to add more sugar 'if necessary') and thick; thin, watery sauce will not hold a foam. Commercial or freshly cooked sauce is the equivalent today.
Apple snow — sweetened apple pulp lightened with beaten egg white — appears under that name in eighteenth-century English receipt books and persists through the nineteenth century as a cheap, pale, easily digested sweet often recommended for invalids and children. The point here is what to do with apple sauce already made: a jar of sauce, a single egg and a scrape of nutmeg turn a preserve into a company dish.