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Apple Cream
Mrs. Mann.
One cup thick cream, one cup sugar, beat till very smooth ; then beat the whites of two eggs, and add ; stew apples in water till soft ; take them from the water with a fork; steam them if you prefer. Pour the cream over the apples when cold.
This is a plain nineteenth-century apple fool: sweetened cream lightened with beaten egg white, poured cold over stewed apples. The problem is the egg white, which is never heated at any point.
- The egg whites are never cookedThe whites are beaten raw, folded into cream and sugar, and served as-is over cold fruit. Nothing in the method brings them above room temperature, so any Salmonella present survives to the plate. This is the single reason the recipe should not be made as written.
- Nothing else in the dish protects youNothing in the cream mixture protects you -- There is no alcohol and no sugar syrup cooked to temperature. The apples contribute some acidity, but not on a scale that makes a raw-egg cream safe; the sugar is simply beaten in cold, and the finished cream stands until the apples have cooled.
- Holding timeThe recipe mixes the cream first and pours it over the apples "when cold," so the dressed cream is likely to stand while the fruit cools. Nothing in the method calls for chilling it, and a raw-egg mixture left standing at room temperature is where the risk lies.
- If you want to make an apple foolUse a current recipe. Modern versions of this dessert either omit the egg white entirely and rely on whipped cream for lightness, or specify pasteurized egg product, and they will tell you the handling and holding times.
- Reading the original"Thick cream" here means heavy or double cream, not soured cream. The recipe gives no quantity of apples and no yield; a cup of cream with a cup of sugar is a very sweet dressing meant to be spooned sparingly over a dish of stewed fruit, probably serving four to six.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local women, each signed with the contributor's name, and it is generally counted among the earliest of the American charitable community cookbooks. That format explains the shape of this entry: Mrs. Mann wrote down what she did, not what a stranger would need to know, which is why there is no quantity of apples and no serving size. The dish itself belongs to the long English family of fools and creams, fruit stewed soft and drowned in sweetened cream, a form documented in English cookery from the sixteenth century onward and carried into American kitchens with the apple orchards of the Northeast and Midwest.