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Maple Mousse
Whip one pint of cream and drain; beat the yolks of four eggs light. Put in a saucepan a generous cup of maple syrup, stir in the beaten yolks, and place the mixture over the fire until the egg thickens the syrup. Take from fire and stand pan in dish of ice water; beat until it is light and cold, then gently mix with the cream. Pack in ice, using more salt than for ice cream; let stand in a cold place three of four hours.
— Miss Louise W. Havens
A still-frozen cream — no churning, no ice-cream freezer crank — set with a cooked maple custard. The hinge is temperature control: the yolks must thicken without scrambling, and the base must be genuinely cold before the cream goes in.
- The custard stepCook the yolk-and-syrup mixture over low heat or a bain-marie, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon — about 170-175F. Maple syrup carries a lot of heat and the yolks will curdle quickly if the pan goes above simmering.
- "Whip and drain"Cream of this period was unhomogenised and often richer than today's carton. Whipping released liquid that was poured off. With modern heavy cream (36% fat or more) there is generally nothing to drain; whip to soft peaks and stop, since the mixture is folded and then frozen.
- Cool it completelyThe ice-water bath is not optional. Beating the base until it is cold and light both aerates it and keeps it from deflating the cream. A stand mixer or hand beater over an ice bath does this in a few minutes.
- "Pack in ice, using more salt than for ice cream"The original means burying a sealed mould in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt — more salt means a colder brine, needed because nothing is being churned. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job; use a metal loaf pan or covered mould, and expect four hours or more.
- A generous cup of syrupRead this as about 9 fl oz. Use real Grade A dark maple syrup; pancake syrup is corn syrup with flavouring and will taste flat and cloying here.
- TextureBecause it is never churned, the result is softer and less airy than churned ice cream rather than firmly scoopable, and it melts fast. Serve straight from the freezer.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six to eight in small glasses or cups.
"Mousse" appears in American cookbooks by the late nineteenth century as the name for a frozen cream that was packed in salt and ice but never stirred, distinguishing it from churned ice cream and from the water-based sorbets and sherbets on the same menus; the still-frozen method suited a kitchen without a crank freezer or without a second pair of hands to turn one. Community cookbooks like this one collected such receipts under contributors' names, and the attribution to Miss Louise W. Havens is the whole provenance the book offers.