Home › Sauce › Apple Snow (Two cupfuls of strained stewed)
Apple Snow (Two cupfuls of strained stewed)
Two cupfuls of strained stewed apple, whites of two eggs and one cupful of granulated sugar. Beat all together with eggbeater till firm. Serve in individual glasses, piling whipped cream on top if liked.
Apple snow is uncooked from start to finish: the raw whites are beaten into cold stewed apple and taken straight to the table. That is the whole problem with it.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in this recipe brings the eggs above room temperature, and the sugar and acid in the apple do not pasteurise them. Salmonella can be present inside intact, clean shells, and a dessert held in a glass and eaten cold gives it every advantage.
- Who it reachesSnows and whips of this kind were often recommended for children, the elderly and the sick — exactly the groups for whom a raw-egg infection is most likely to become serious.
- Whipped cream on topThe finished glasses sit at room temperature while being assembled and served, which is warm enough for any bacteria present to multiply.
- Not fixable by techniqueBeating harder or chilling longer changes nothing. If you want this dessert, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg whites or a cooked meringue base.
- Reading the quantitiesFor context rather than instruction: a cupful here is most likely the 8 fl oz cup usual in American books of the period, and two cupfuls of strained stewed apple means apple cooked soft and pushed through a sieve — closer to a thick unsweetened applesauce than to modern chunky stewed fruit.
- Why so much sugarA full cup of granulated sugar to two cups of apple looks heavy now. Sugar does stabilise a raw egg-white foam, which would help the snow hold its shape in the glass without gelatine.
Apple snow belongs to a long English line of "snows" — fruit pulp or cream beaten with egg white until it stood up white and stiff — that appears in cookery books from at least the sixteenth century onward, well before mechanical eggbeaters made the work easy. The rotary beater, in common household use by the late nineteenth century, made short work of a task that had previously meant prolonged beating with a bundle of twigs or a knife blade. A snow could be eaten alone in a glass or spooned over plain cake or baked pudding; two egg whites of this kind were often left over after the yolks went into custard or mayonnaise.