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Apple Snow
3 egg whites Powdered sugar Pare, quarter and core 4 sour apples. Steam until soft and rub through sieve. There should be 3/4 cup cooked apple. Beat the whites of eggs until stiff; add gradually apples sweetened to taste. Pile lightly on a dish and serve with custard sauce. One tablespoon lemon juice custard sauce. may be added. cup chopped nuts cup grated bread crumbs 2 tablespoons sugar
The text as printed is both garbled and, in one respect, unsafe: the beaten egg whites are never cooked, and the fractions in the measurements have dropped out of the page.
- Uncooked egg whiteThe whites are folded into apple pulp and served as they are, so nothing in the finished dish reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Raw or barely-cooked egg was routine in household cookery of this period; that risk is no longer considered acceptable, particularly for children, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised. If you want an apple snow, work from a current recipe that addresses the egg.
- The text is brokenSeveral fractions have been lost in printing: "There should be cup cooked apple" and the trailing "cup chopped nuts cup grated bread crumbs" have both lost their quantities. The custard sauce is referred to twice but never given, and the nuts, crumbs and two tablespoons of sugar have no role in the method as printed -- they appear to be stray matter from an adjoining recipe. There is no honest way to reconstruct the intended quantities.
- Sour applesThis means a tart cooking apple with enough acid to hold its flavour against sugar and egg white. Baldwin, Rhode Island Greening and Northern Spy were among the tart cooking apples available at the time; Granny Smith, or Bramley where it can be had, will serve.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this date, powdered sugar is finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today.
- Steam and sieveSteaming rather than boiling keeps the pulp drier, which helps the foam hold. Rubbing through a sieve was the standard way to reduce cooked fruit to a purée free of skin and fibre.
Apple snow is one of the oldest surviving English dessert forms, a descendant of the "snow" made by whisking cream and egg white into a froth and heaping it over an apple or a rosemary branch to look like snow on a bush -- a dish documented in English cookery as early as the mid-sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century the froth and the fruit had merged into a single pale, aerated pudding, and it appears in many American household manuals of the period as a cheap, light dish for invalids and children -- four apples and three eggs, no butter, no flour, no oven.