[Sca-cooks] baked snow?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Nichola commented:
>>With a twist.... "Snow" is period... If You bake it I think you are
>>breaking period.. but I can not be sure...
>Huh? "Baked snow"? The snow that I'm thinking of, which we in fact 
>discussed here recently, is egg whites and cream and sugar and 
>perhaps a few other things. It has to be kept cool or it melts into 
>a runny mess. It's hard enough to handle at room temperature, 
>without baking it. Or are you speaking of something else?

I _think_ Nichola is speaking of the same stuff (but forgive me if I 
read it all incorrectly), but may not have actually made the stuff in 
the way the recipe specifies. Frequently people find they get more 
usable product beating the egg whites and cream separately: the 
period recipe produces a product a little more like a syllabub, and 
less of it. You can't bake snow; I'd bet money on having it collapse 
in seconds in the oven. The cream makes it too unstable.

But I think Nichola's point is that snow is not necessarily an 
indication of meringue-making technology in period, and I tend to 
agree.

Adamantius