Faux Snow

Centuries ago, English-speaking people used to amuse themselves by making a dessert called snow from whipped cream and egg whites. You’d take spoonfuls of this soft white stuff and fling drifts of it onto a “hill” into which a branch of rosemary might be stuck to suggest a pine tree. Voila: instant winter wonderland. In most snow recipes, the hill is a loaf of bread, but the anonymous 16th century English book “A Proper Booke of Cokerye” calls for an apple, which makes it sound as if you could eat the hill as well as the “snow” in that particular recipe.

Snow was popular from the 16th through the 18th centuries. That was the period of ice cream’s greatest fashionability, because only the very rich could afford to make it. They were the ones who could get their hands on ice in summer, because they had special caves or cellars for storing ice harvested during winter.

So it’s hard to avoid suspecting that snow was the middle-class substitute for ice cream, particularly since snow faded away after the 18th century. It was during the 19th century, of course, that ice finally became cheap enough for ordinary people to consider making a real frozen dessert.

The snow recipe remained just about unchanged throughout the whole period. Beat the cream and egg whites with a spoon, add a flavoring (usually rose water) and then whisk it with a primitive whisk made from a stick “clove in four” (“take a sticke and make it cleane, and than cutte it in the end foure square”).

It seems a pretty simple-minded dessert today. At the time, though, it was really something, and you would have been impressed, unless you had a cellar full of ice.