Dainty Dessert
A particularly dainty dessert is made by peeling and grating one large apple, keeping the fruit that is grated covered with sprinklings of powdered sugar while the work progresses, to keep it from turning brown. Break into the grated apple the whites of two eggs and beat all together with an eggbeater. When the mixture is very stiff and light, heap it into a dish and pour around it a soft custard, which is ice cold.
This is a snow or "apple snow" — grated raw apple whipped stiff with raw egg white and served in a pool of cold stirred custard. The whites are never cooked at any stage, which is the problem.
- The raw egg white is the issueNothing in this dessert reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Raw white is often assumed to be safer than raw yolk; it is not, since contamination can be present in the white or carried in from the shell during separation. The mixture is then held at room temperature while it is beaten and heaped, which is exactly the wrong condition.
- The custard compounds itA "soft custard" of the period is a stirred egg-and-milk custard cooked only until it coats the spoon, judged by eye rather than by thermometer, so there is no assurance it reaches the 160F/71C at which egg in a liquid custard is considered safe. This recipe gives no custard method at all, and the finished sauce is chilled and served with no further heating.
- Who should avoid it entirelyUncooked egg is not advisable for anyone, but the risk is materially higher for young children, pregnant women, the elderly and anyone immunocompromised. If you want an apple snow or a crème anglaise, work from a current recipe with a measured custard temperature.
- "Soft custard"For reading the book rather than making the dish: this is the pouring custard now generally called crème anglaise — milk, egg yolks and sugar, thickened over gentle heat and never boiled. It is not the baked, set custard the word suggests today.
- Why the sugar goes on as you grateThe sprinkling of powdered sugar is not for sweetness alone. Coating the shreds limits their contact with air and slows the polyphenol oxidase browning that starts soon after the apple is cut. Acid does the same job, which is why many versions of apple snow include lemon juice.
- ScaleOne apple and two whites make a very light foam that will not hold for long. As written it is a single generous portion or two small ones.
Apple snow belongs to a long English family of "snows" — fruit pulp or cream beaten to a froth with egg white and sugar — that appears in cookery books from at least the sixteenth century onward, when the whisking was done by hand, sometimes with a bundle of twigs, and period recipes call for beating that could run to an hour or more. The rotary eggbeater, increasingly common in American kitchens from the 1870s, is what turns this into a quick dessert and helps explain why the book can call it dainty rather than laborious. "Dainty" here carries its period sense of delicate and refined in small quantity, a compliment much used in turn-of-the-century American household writing. The pairing of a stiff white foam heaped in the centre with a cold pouring custard around it is the same architecture as îles flottantes.