How to Make Snowballs for Dessert, 1798

 

 This easy recipe comes from a book titled ‘The Housekeeper’s Instructor 1798.’

 

Snow Balls.

Pare and take out the cores of five large baking apples, and fill the holes with orange or quince marmalade.

Then make some good hot paste, roll your apples in it, and make your crust of an equal thickness. (I think by ‘paste’ they mean a kind of pastry dough)

 

Put them in a tin dripping-pan, bake them in a moderate oven, and when you take them out, make icing for them.

 

Let your icing be about a quarter of an inch thick, and set them at a good distance from the fire till they are hardened; but take care you do not let them brown.

 

Put one in the middle of a dish, and the others round it.

 

Icing:

Take a pound (!) of double-refined sugar pounded and sifted fine, and mix it with the whites of twenty-four eggs (24!), in an earthen pan. Whisk them well for two or three hours till it looks white and thick.

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So…how many people in shifts will it take to whisk the sugar/egg white mixture TWO OR THREE HOURS??? Those snowballs better be appreciated!! Because I doubt that they would EVER be made again!! Not in THIS house!!