Apple Float
1 pound of fine, mealy cooking apples pared and quartered. Half cup of water. 1 lemon. 8 ounces of sugar. 1 ounce of butter. 2 whole eggs and 6 whites. Clove or cinnamon extract.
Stew the apples with the water, sugar, lemon juice and shaved or grated rind and the butter, in a saucepan with a lid, till they are tender. Rub the pulp through a seive. Add the 2 eggs and cook the mixture 5 or 10 minutes till thick. Then cool, flavor, beat light and add the 6 whites of eggs whip ped firm and beat 5 minutes more. Keep cold. Serve in saucers of custard. And why do fifteen families living separately have fifteen small portions going to waste when, if all were together, the small portions in the hands of a skillful cook would make a dish of which nearly all would partake and save a large item in the marketing?
The apple base here is genuinely cooked, but the six egg whites that give the dish its name are folded in raw and the float is then held cold and served without further heating. That is the part that no longer stands up.
- Raw whites, never heatedThe two whole eggs are stirred into the hot pulp and cooked five to ten minutes, which is fine. The six whipped whites go in after the mixture has cooled, and the finished float is kept cold and spooned over custard, so those whites never reach any temperature at all. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and a chilled, sugary, aerated foam held for hours is exactly the situation food-safety guidance is written for.
- Volume makes it worseSix whites is a large amount of raw egg spread through a dessert that will be portioned out to many people. If any one egg is contaminated it is distributed through every saucer. Use a current recipe if you want to make an apple float.
- "Rub the pulp through a seive"The period instruction assumes a hair or wire sieve and a wooden pestle to remove skin fragments and fibre. A food mill with the fine plate does the same work; a blender does not, since it purées the fibre rather than removing it.
- "Fine, mealy cooking apples"Mealy here means fruit that breaks down and collapses to a dry fluff in cooking rather than holding its shape — the old Rhode Island Greening, Gravenstein or Bramley type. Firmer modern dessert apples such as Gala or Honeycrisp tend to hold together and give a wetter, sauce-like pulp rather than the light purée the recipe depends on.
- Eight ounces of sugarWeight, not volume: about 1 1/8 cups granulated. Against a single pound of apples this is a very sweet base by current taste, though the sugar is also doing structural work in the foam.
- "Clove or cinnamon extract"Spice extracts in alcohol were sold alongside vanilla and lemon in the nineteenth century. Cinnamon extract is still stocked; clove extract is scarce, and a few drops of clove oil or a pinch of ground clove will stand in.
- "Serve in saucers of custard"The custard is a thin pouring sauce — a boiled custard or crème anglaise — ladled into shallow dishes with the float heaped on top. The recipe gives no custard quantity and no yield; a pound of apples with two whole eggs and six whites would make something on the order of six to eight of these saucers.
The American Pastry Cook, by the Chicago cookery writer Jessup Whitehead, belongs to the trade-manual side of American cookbook publishing — written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than housewives, which is why quantities arrive in ounces and pounds and why a dessert is described in terms of what it costs to serve. Apple float is closely related to English apple snow: sweetened fruit purée lightened with beaten whites, eaten cold, often over a pouring custard. It appears in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, at a season when apples were among the few fruits a kitchen could count on from autumn through spring and egg whites were a common leftover from custard-making. The sermon tacked onto the end — fifteen families wasting fifteen small portions — is an argument for cooperative or communal cooking on grounds of economy, a topic that surfaces in the period's reform press and in cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s.