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Apple Snow
¾ cup apple pulp Powdered sugar.
Pare, quarter, and core four sour apples, steam until soft, and rub through sieve; there should be three-fourths cup apple pulp. Beat on a platter whites of eggs until stiff (using wire whisk), add gradually apple sweetened to taste, and continue beating. Pile lightly on glass dish, chill, and serve with Boiled Custard. 1/3 lb. prunes Whites 5 eggs
A two-ingredient froth of steamed apple and raw beaten egg white, of a type that filled the cold-dessert chapters of American cookbooks for a century. The apple side is straightforward; the egg white is the problem.
- Why this one failsThe egg whites are never heated at any stage. They are beaten raw, folded with cooled apple pulp, chilled, and served. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and chilling does nothing to reduce it. If you want an apple snow, use a current recipe written for the ingredients now sold.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg white is a particular hazard for young children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised, which includes the invalid and nursery cookery for which light fruit desserts of this type were often recommended.
- The accompaniment is not the issueBoiled custard, despite the name, is cooked to the point of thickening on a double boiler and poses no comparable risk. The raw component here is the snow itself.
- Sour applesThe recipe means tart cooking apples — Baldwin, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening in period terms. Granny Smith or Bramley are the modern equivalents. Sweet dessert apples give a flat, cloying pulp.
- Quantity of appleFour apples pared, quartered, cored and steamed reduce to about three-quarters of a cup of sieved pulp. The pulp must be completely cold before it meets the whites or the froth collapses.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period 'powdered sugar' means a fine-ground granulated sugar, finer than ordinary granulated but coarser than the confectioners' or icing sugar sold now, which such books list separately. Modern confectioners' sugar is the nearest substitute for an uncooked mixture, since it dissolves without grittiness.
- Beating on a platterThe flat-platter-and-wire-whisk method predates the standing mixer and was used to get maximum air into a small quantity of whites. It is a genuine technique, not a quirk, but it works only with a broad shallow surface.
- YieldThe recipe states no number of servings; three-quarters of a cup of pulp with a few whites makes a small, very light dish. Snows of this kind also do not hold well, and tend to weep soon after being piled up.
Apple snow belongs to a long line of English "snow" dishes going back at least to the seventeenth century, when cream and egg white were whipped with a birch rod and heaped over a rosemary sprig to look like a snow-covered bush. By the time Fannie Farmer assembled the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, the form had shrunk to a thrifty, almost fat-free froth of fruit pulp and beaten whites, one of a family of cold desserts — snows, whips, sponges, souffles. The pairing with boiled custard was standard, the custard supplying the richness the snow deliberately lacked.