Nondairy treats

Hello everyone and welcome to another instalment of my crazy blog. Today we will be talking about a frozen dessert treat that i found in a old cook book owned by my sister that she wont give up. But this item comes from the early part of the twentieth century where refrigeration has just come into the home, but families are still practicing utilizing every part of what they get and not wasting anything. The recipe is for snow, not the kind of snow that you find in high end restaurants where they mix ingredients in with milk and then freeze it using liquid nitrogen. To put it simply its a frozen unbaked meringue, now this for the most part was not served as a dessert unto its self but as a ingredient in a lot of baked good that was developed during that time period, but during world war two dairy and cheese where rationed out and people had to find a alternate source of treats, thus came snow.

Now there are three types of meringue. French meringue that is just sugar and egg whites whipped to soft to stiff peaks, Swiss meringue is where the sugar is heated to 110 F degrees then poured in to the egg whites while they are being whipped. The third one is a Italian meringue the only difference between this style and a Swiss style is that the sugar is heated to 175 to 180 F and then mixed in with the egg whites. When doing this for the first time use a french meringue, just so that you have some experience with whipping egg whites to the desired peak.

When flavoring and coloring, it is important to understand what you are using in the meringue you should only use water based coloring agents if you use oil base the whites wont be able to hold air cells. The flavoring agent would be a extract of some flavor, those are alcohol based, if you added that to the egg whites it would denature them and they would not hold air cells. Well back to the laboratory, will post more findings later.