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Apple Snow
Wipe, pare, core and quarter 1 sour apple. Put in small strainer, place over boiling water, cover, and let steam until apple is soft, then rub through a sieve. There should be 1/4 cup of apple sauce. Beat white of egg until stiff. Sweeten apple pulp to taste and add gradually to beaten white of egg. Pile lightly on glass serving dish, chill, and serve with steamed custard or cream. (Prepared in this manner the white of egg is very easy to retain.) 1 How to Serve a Banana Remove skin from a thoroughly ripe banana and scrape to remove the astringent principle which lies close to the skin. Cut in thin slices; arrange on a serving dish; sprinkle with sugar and a few drops of lemon juice.
The apple pulp here is cooked, but the egg white is not, and the whole point of the dish is that it goes to someone who is ill. That combination is the problem.
- Raw egg white, uncooked and unheatedThe apple pulp is added gradually to the beaten white, and the dish is then chilled. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present inside intact, clean shell eggs. Chilling limits bacterial growth but does not remove the risk.
- The intended eater is the worst candidateThe dish reads as invalid cookery; the parenthetical about the white being "very easy to retain" points that way. Convalescents, the elderly, the very young, anyone run down by illness -- these are precisely the group for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become serious. A current recipe using pasteurised egg white should be used instead.
- The custard does not fix itThe steamed custard or cream is a separate accompaniment poured alongside. It never heats the snow itself.
- "Sour apple"A cooking apple, not a spoiled one. Period writers meant a tart variety -- the sort that collapses to pulp readily. Bramley, Granny Smith or similar.
- The strainer over boiling waterAn improvised steamer: a small sieve set over a pan, covered. Any steamer basket does the same job. Steaming rather than boiling keeps the pulp thick enough to hold air.
- YieldA quarter cup of apple pulp and one egg white makes a single invalid's portion.
- The banana noteThe second paragraph is a separate item that has run on in the original text. The "astringent principle" refers to the bitter inner peel tissue and strands clinging to the fruit; scraping them off is optional and harmless, and this part involves no raw egg.
Apple snow -- fruit pulp lightened with beaten egg white -- appears in English household books long before this one. Its presence in a Sick Room chapter reflects a settled nineteenth-century idea of invalid cookery: food for the ill should be pale, bland, cold, light in the stomach and above all easy to swallow, and egg was regarded as concentrated nourishment that could be got into someone with no appetite. Community cookbooks, produced by church and Bible-class groups to raise funds, often carried such a section, since nursing at home was ordinary domestic work rather than a hospital matter. The parenthetical remark that the white "is very easy to retain" is a frank piece of period sickroom language -- the dish was chosen partly because a queasy patient could keep it down.