Home › Recipes › Chocolate Mousse
Chocolate Mousse
4 cups thin cream, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 3/4 tablespoon granulated gelatine, 3 tablespoons boiling water, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Place whip churn in bowl containing cream, and work with a quick downward and slow upward motion, removing whip as it forms to puree strainer placed over bowl, and continue whipping until cream comes below perforations in churn. Melt chocolate, add powdered sugar, and gradually the cream that would not whip, together with the cream drained from whip cream. Stir over fire until boiling point is reached, then add gelatine dissolved in boiling water, granulated sugar, and vanilla. Strain cooked mixture into a bowl set in pan of ice water. Stir constantly until mixture thickens, then fold in whip from cream. Turn into a chilled mould, fill to overflowing, cover with buttered paper (buttered side up), adjust cover, pack in salt and ice, using two parts finely crushed ice to one part rock salt, and let stand four hours. It will be necessary to turn off the water and repack before the freezing is accomplished.
This is a frozen mousse in the old sense: no churning, no eggs, just sweetened chocolate cream stiffened with gelatine and packed in salt and ice until firm. The equipment is what dates it, not the method.
- The hinge: chill the base before foldingThe cooked chocolate mixture must be stirred over ice water until it visibly thickens, but not until it sets. Fold the whipped cream in too early and the whole thing separates into a chocolate layer and a foam layer as it freezes.
- Whip churn and puree strainerA whip churn was a perforated plunger worked up and down in a deep bowl; the stiff foam was skimmed off to a sieve to drain while the thinner cream fell back. A stand mixer or hand whisk does the same job — whip the cream to soft peaks and drain any weeping liquid through a fine sieve.
- "Thin cream"Roughly 18-20 percent fat, close to modern light cream, which will not whip today. Use heavy cream (36 percent) and set aside about 1 cup of it unwhipped to stand in for "the cream that would not whip" in the chocolate base; whip the remaining 3 cups.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's unsweetened baking chocolate. Unsweetened Baker's chocolate is still sold, though no longer under the "Premium No. 1" name; two ounces is what the recipe calls for, and the 1/2 cup powdered sugar plus 3/4 cup granulated sugar supplies all the sweetness.
- Gelatine3/4 tablespoon of granulated gelatine is about 2 1/4 teaspoons, near enough to one 1/4-ounce envelope. The recipe dissolves it in the 3 tablespoons boiling water and stirs it into the chocolate mixture once boiling point is reached; keep it off the fire after that, as prolonged boiling weakens gelatine's setting power.
- Freezing without salt and iceA home freezer set to 0F will do the work of the salt-and-ice pack; cover the surface with buttered parchment, buttered side up as the recipe directs, wrap the mould, and give it 4-6 hours. Filling the mould to overflowing matters -- air pockets frost over.
- Turning off the waterThe instruction to drain and repack applies only to the ice-and-salt method: melted brine warms and must be poured off through the hole in the freezing tub before fresh ice and salt go in.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; four cups of cream, whipped and combined with the base, will fill a mould of roughly a quart and a half. Unmould by dipping briefly in warm water and serve at once; it softens quickly.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate works to a date its own advertising gave as 1780 and spent the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries issuing small recipe booklets like this one, several compiled with the help of Boston cooking-school figures such as Maria Parloa and Fannie Merritt Farmer.