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Snow Ball Apples
Pare and core 5 medium sized apples. Bake in sauce made by cooking. 1/2 cup confectioners, sugar. 10c worth of marshmallows. 1/2 cup boiling water until smooth.
Pour over apples and bake until done. When taken from stove, roll in shredded cocoanut and serve cold.
A short, sweet-shop-era baked apple that leans entirely on commercial marshmallows for its sauce. The instructions are compressed even by Mrs. Wilson's standards, so a few things need filling in.
- The price-based measurement"10c worth of marshmallows" is genuinely unrecoverable as a weight; marshmallow prices varied by shop and year. Judging by early-1920s confectionery prices it is likely somewhere around a quarter-pound, which is about 2 cups of miniature marshmallows, but treat that as an estimate rather than a conversion.
- Make the sauce before the apples go inThe recipe reads as if the apples bake in raw ingredients. They do not: melt the marshmallows with the confectioners' sugar and 1/2 cup boiling water over low heat until smooth, then pour that over the apples.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for baked apples; 40 to 50 minutes for medium apples, until a skewer slides through with no resistance.
- The hinge: keep the sauce from scorchingA marshmallow-and-sugar syrup is mostly sugar and will catch and brown at the edges of the dish long before the apples are soft. Bake in a deep dish, baste every 15 minutes, and add a spoonful of hot water if the syrup starts to tighten or darken.
- Choice of applePared and cored apples with no filling will collapse if they are soft-fleshed. Use a firm baking apple that holds shape.
- "Cocoanut"The period spelling for coconut. Shredded coconut of the period was often unsweetened and drier than today's sweetened flake; unsweetened shredded coconut gives a closer result and keeps the dish from going cloying.
- Rolling and coolingRoll the apples while still hot and sticky so the coconut adheres, then cool completely as directed. The syrup sets to a soft glaze as it cools, which is what makes them look like snowballs.
- YieldFive apples, one each. This is a dessert.
Mrs. Wilson's cook book came out of her work as a newspaper household editor in Philadelphia, where she wrote for cooks who were being pushed toward packaged goods and away from long kitchen labor, and this recipe shows it plainly: a sauce built from bought marshmallows and shop coconut rather than a custard or a syrup made from scratch. Marshmallows had shifted by the 1910s and 1920s from a confectioner's specialty made with gum or gelatin toward a cheap grocery item sold by weight, which is one reason a cook could be told to buy ten cents' worth and nothing more. "Snowball" was used in the period for a range of sweets rolled in white coconut or coated in white icing, cakes and puddings among them.