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Apple Float
Mrs. O. L. Parker.
To one quart of apples, partially stewed and well mashed, put the whites of three eggs well beaten, and four heaping tablespoons of loaf sugar; beat them together for fifteen minutes, and eat with rich milk and nutmeg.
This is a raw-egg dessert: the whites are whipped into cooled stewed apple and served without any further cooking. That single fact rules it out as written, though the rest of the wording is worth translating.
- The whites are never cookedNothing in this recipe brings the egg white above room temperature. The apple is only "partially stewed" and is mashed and beaten for a quarter of an hour before serving, by which point it is cool. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, inside the egg; a fifteen-minute beat aerates but does not pasteurize.
- Sugar and acid do not make it safeFour tablespoons of sugar in a quart of apple is not a preservative concentration, and the mild acidity of stewed apple does not reliably kill pathogens. Foam desserts of this kind also sit at room temperature while they are being served, which is the worst holding condition for them.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg white is a particular hazard for small children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised. If you want an apple float, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg whites.
- "Loaf sugar"Refined white sugar sold in a hard cone or block, which the cook broke up and pounded. It was among the finest and most expensive grades available; ordinary granulated sugar is its descendant.
- "Rich milk"In a nineteenth-century American kitchen this generally means unskimmed milk with the cream left on it, richer than today's whole milk. Milk of the period would also have been unpasteurized.
- A quart of applesThe wording does not make clear whether the quart is measured as prepared fruit or after stewing and mashing; either reading is possible.
- Fifteen minutes of beatingA realistic figure for a hand whisk or a wire egg beater working cold apple pulp into whipped whites. The name refers to the foam sitting on the milk poured around it.
Floats, whips and "snows" were a family of Anglo-American desserts built on the same trick — beaten egg white folded into a fruit pulp, jelly or wine, then served in a shallow dish with cream or milk poured beneath so the foam sits on top. Apple was among the cheapest and most available versions in the northern United States, where barrels of winter keepers lasted into spring. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published in the mid-1870s) was one of the earliest and most successful American charity compilations, sold to raise money for the Chicago Home for the Friendless, and its contents were credited by name to local women — hence "Mrs. O. L. Parker" above the recipe. Raw-egg desserts appear in such books without comment; the shift to commercially distributed eggs, and the recognition of Salmonella enteritidis in intact eggs in the later twentieth century, is what retired the dish in this form.