Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mousse of Fowl
Mousse of Fowl
Proceed as for MOUSSE OF VEAL, substituting fowl for the veal. Cooked ham or tongue should be used instead of sweetbread. When turned out of the mould, garnish with a lettuce or cress salad, and omit the truffles and aspic. Put about the dish a few fancy shaped slices of ham, coated with aspic.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Mousse of Veal in front of you and only lists the swaps. A few of the terms have shifted meaning since, and one omission changes the dish more than it looks.
- You need the parent recipeNothing here tells you the proportions, the binding, or the setting method — all of that sits under Mousse of Veal. Read that entry first; this page only substitutes the meat and the garnish.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerIn Victorian usage a fowl generally meant a mature bird, tougher and more strongly flavoured than a modern supermarket chicken, and the meat would have been cooked before pounding. Use the meat of a poached chicken, thigh and breast together, or the dish will taste thin; no weight is specified here.
- Ham or tongue instead of sweetbreadThe veal version leans on sweetbread for delicacy; here the cured meat is doing the seasoning work. Salt-cured ham or pressed ox tongue is much saltier than sweetbread, so hold back on salt until the mixture is mixed and tasted.
- Pounding, then sievingThe Victorian method was a mortar and a hair sieve. A food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still push the purée through a fine sieve afterwards — the sinew in poached fowl will not break down, and it is the sieving that gives a mousse its texture rather than a pâté's.
- Aspic is structural, not decorativeThe instruction to omit the aspic applies to the garnish only, not to whatever sets the mousse. If the parent recipe relies on aspic jelly in the body of the mousse, keep it; only the glazed cut-outs and the truffle are dropped.
- Cream goes in coldFold whipped cream into the purée only once the base is cold and beginning to thicken. Warm base collapses the cream and the mousse sets dense instead of light.
- Setting and turning outAllow at least four hours in the refrigerator, longer for a large mould. Dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a cold plate; a chilled serving dish stops the surface going slack while you arrange the garnish.
- Yield and servingThis page gives no quantities; the mould size and number served follow from the parent Mousse of Veal entry. It is served cold, never reheated.
Cold savoury mousses of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century cold table and the ambitious moulded entree, and they show how thoroughly French practice had been absorbed into English household cookery by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled. The technique — cooked meat pounded, sieved, bound with a veloute or bechamel and aspic, lightened with whipped cream and set in a decorated mould — is essentially the one French professional cookery went on to codify, and a dictionary format let a publisher print it once and then cross-reference endlessly: mousse of veal, of fowl, of ham, of salmon, each entry a short list of substitutions. The garnish differs between entries: the veal version gets truffle and glazed aspic, the fowl version lettuce or cress and a few ham cut-outs.