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Apple Snow Filling
For cake or pudding, take the white of one egg, one cupful of confectionery sugar and one grated apple; beat all together for thirty-five minutes, then flavor. The apple must be sour.
This is an uncooked egg-white filling: nothing in it is ever heated, and it is spread on finished cake and eaten as is.
- The egg is never cookedThe white goes into the bowl raw and stays raw. There is no sugar syrup poured in hot, no baking, no standing over water — the whole preparation happens at room temperature. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that beating cannot touch.
- Sugar is not a safeguardA cupful of confectioner's sugar to one white is not enough to make this a sugar-saturated icing that resists bacterial growth, and the grated apple adds moisture. The recipe offers it for cake or pudding, with no cooking step at any point.
- The apple adds a second problemGrated raw apple browns and weeps within the hour, so a filling built on it will not hold well after mixing.
- What to do insteadUse a current recipe for an apple-flavoured buttercream or a cooked meringue filling, where the egg is either absent or brought up to temperature.
- On the thirty-five minutesThat figure suggests a hand whisk or a rotary egg-beater and a cook with the arm for it. It is above all a measure of labour.
- Confectionery sugarThe period term for what is now sold as confectioners', powdered or icing sugar — finely milled; the modern product is also cut with a little starch.
- Why sourA tart apple — a Greening, a Newtown Pippin, a Granny Smith today. The book insists on it without saying why; the likeliest reason is that a cupful of powdered sugar to one white is already very sweet.
"Apple snow" is a long-established English whipped-egg confection, appearing in eighteenth-century receipt books as stewed or grated apple beaten into egg whites and heaped in a glass; snow dishes of apple and white of egg are recorded earlier still. Here it appears not as a dish in its own right but as a cake filling. The thirty-five minutes of beating is the honest cost of the recipe: sustained aeration by hand.