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Apple Snow (Nice simple sweet and one)
Is a nice simple sweet and one that is always appreciated. Bake three or four large cooking apples; remove the skins carefully and pass the remainder through a sieve. Beat the whites of two eggs to a stiff froth and by degrees add three ounces of fine sugar, then the apple and beat until all is light and soft like snow. Pile this roughly on a dish and serve with whipped cream or with custard made with the yolks of two eggs and a pint of milk; sweeten to taste. Serve wafers with this sweet.
The apple pulp is cooked, but everything after that is not: the whites of two raw eggs are beaten with sugar and fruit and served cold, with no heating step at any point.
- Why this one failsRaw egg white is the entire structure of apple snow, and it is never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The beaten froth sits at room temperature on the dish while it is served. A current recipe, built around pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue, should be used instead.
- The custard is a second exposureA pint of milk with two yolks is a very thin custard, and the recipe gives no temperature and no indication of thickening beyond "sweeten to taste." Stirred custards need to be held long enough to reach about 175F, and nothing here tells the cook that.
- "Fine sugar" means casterThree ounces is roughly a scant half cup of caster sugar, ground finer than granulated so it dissolves into the froth without weeping. Confectioners' sugar is not the same thing; it carries cornstarch.
- "Cooking apples" is a real categoryThe book means a sharp variety that collapses to a fluff in the oven -- Bramley in Britain, Northern Spy or Rhode Island Greening in older American kitchens. A sweeter dessert apple tends to give a denser, wetter pulp that folds in less lightly.
- Sieving, not blendingPressing the baked flesh through a sieve removes skin fragments and core threads and leaves a light pulp that folds in easily. A blender or food processor tends to work the same pulp into a heavier, gluey paste.
- WafersThese are thin sweet biscuits in the langue-de-chat or fan-wafer line, served as the crisp element against a soft sweet -- not the American ice-cream wafer.
Apple snow belongs to a long line of English "snow" dishes going back to at least the mid-sixteenth century, where cream and egg white were whipped with a stick and an apple and a bush of rosemary set in the white mound before it was sent to table. By the nineteenth century the stick had given way to a wire whisk and the cream to fruit pulp, and snows appear throughout Victorian and Edwardian household books as the cheapest possible show dish: two eggs, a few apples and some sugar produce a large, striking sweet at almost no cost. Its place in a turn-of-the-century compendium like this one reflects exactly that appeal.