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Mousse
One quart jar of canned peaches, one pint of whipped cream; mash the peaches, fold the cream in carefully. Pack in ice four or five hours.
— Miss F. Victoria Myers
A still-frozen mousse from the era before home freezers: no churning, no eggs, no custard base — just fruit, cream, and several hours buried in ice and salt.
- "Pack in ice" means ice and rock saltThe recipe says only "pack in ice," but a still-frozen mousse of this kind was normally sealed in a covered mold and buried in crushed ice mixed with coarse salt, commonly something like three parts ice to one of salt. Plain ice alone will not get below freezing; the salt is what drops the temperature enough to set the cream. A modern freezer will do the same job in several hours, and since nothing is churned either way the texture should be broadly comparable.
- A quart jar of canned peachesMost likely home-canned peaches in syrup, though the recipe does not say. Drain them well before mashing or the mousse will freeze icy; a quart jar should give roughly 2 cups of drained fruit. Commercial canned peaches in juice are less sweet, and the recipe has no added sugar at all, so taste and add a few tablespoons if needed.
- Sugar does more than sweetenThe syrup clinging to home-canned fruit was carrying the sugar load here. Sugar lowers the freezing point and keeps a still-frozen mixture from setting up as a solid brick, so an unsweetened version will come out noticeably harder and more crystalline.
- Whip the cream to soft peaksStiffly whipped cream folds badly into wet mashed fruit and breaks into grains. Stop while the peaks still slump, then fold the fruit in with a spatula in three additions.
- Cream has changedCream of this period was unstandardised and its fat content varied considerably, so a pint could be richer or leaner than a modern carton. Use heavy cream at 36 percent fat or higher; anything labeled whipping cream at 30 percent will whip but freezes harder and thinner.
- Yield and servingIf the pint is measured before whipping it roughly doubles, putting the finished mousse at about 6 cups, or eight modest servings; read literally as a pint of already-whipped cream, the yield is about half that. Let it stand at room temperature ten minutes before unmolding or spooning out.
Before mechanical refrigeration reached rural kitchens, a "mousse" in American cookbooks could mean this: a still-frozen dessert, set without a crank freezer, distinguished from ice cream by having no custard and from a water ice by being all cream — though the word covered a range of preparations, some with gelatin or eggs. The technique depended on the winter ice harvest — ice cut from ponds and creeks, packed in sawdust in an icehouse, and drawn on through the summer. Canned peaches point to the other half of the household's preservation calendar: fruit put up in season and turned into something that would have read as genuinely luxurious in a village kitchen. The community-cookbook attribution to a named contributor is typical of the form, where receipts circulated by reputation and a good one carried its maker's name with it.