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Orange Mousse
Put in saucepan 3/4 cup sugar, add Grated rind of 1 orange and 1/4 cup cold water. Stir and boil 1 minute. Soak 1 teaspoon gelatin in 2 tablespoons cold water and dissolve in the hot syrup. Add 2/3 cup orange juice and 2 tablespoons lemon juice. Place on ice, and when it begins to thicken, fold in 1 1/2 cups cream beaten stiff 1/4 cup pistachio nuts, shredded, 1/4 cup candied cherries cut in pieces. Fill ring mold or baking power boxes with mixture. Cover with greased paper and tin cover. Surround with two parts ice mixed with one part salt and let stand 3 hours . Unmold and serve cut in slices. Molds may be decorated with Pistachio nuts and candied cherries, before filling with mixture.
SOUR CREAM DROP COOKIES Cream 1/4 cup butter or margarine. Add gradually 1/2 cup sugar and 1 egg, well beaten. Dissolve 1/4 teaspoon soda in 1/4 cup rich sour cram. Add to first mixture alternately with 1 1/4 cups pastry flour sifted with 1/4 teaspoon salt and 2 teaspoons baking powder. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/4 cup raisins cut in pieces and 1/4 cup nut meats cut in pieces. Drop by spoonfuls on greased tin sheet, and bake in a moderate oven. Double the amount of flour may be used, nuts and raising omitted, and mixture chilled and rolled out and cut in any desired shape, before baking.
Two recipes ran together on this page: a still-frozen orange mousse set in an ice-and-salt pack, and the sour cream drop cookies meant to go beside it. Both are workable now with small adjustments.
- The hinge: fold at the right momentThe orange base must be cold and just beginning to thicken to the consistency of raw egg white before the whipped cream goes in. Too warm and the cream deflates into a syrup; too set and you get gelatin lumps through the mousse.
- Baking powder boxesThese were the cylindrical tin cans baking powder came in, roughly 2 to 3 inches across, used as improvised molds so the mousse could be sliced into rounds. Any straight-sided tin, a small loaf pan or ramekins will do.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerTwo parts crushed ice to one part rock salt held a packed mold well below freezing without churning. A modern freezer does the same job: cover the mold tightly and give it 4 to 6 hours rather than 3, since freezer air chills more slowly than a salt-ice bath.
- Gelatin quantityOne teaspoon of granulated gelatin is close to half a standard envelope. It is there to stabilize, not to set the mixture firm, so do not increase it or the mousse turns rubbery when frozen.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate. Slice with a knife run under hot water and wiped dry between cuts.
- Sour cream and soda"Rich sour cream" would have meant naturally soured, high-fat cream, the kind a household skimming its own milk would have had. Full-fat commercial sour cream works; the quarter teaspoon of soda neutralizes the cream's acid and contributes some lift of its own, with the baking powder supplying most of the rise.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than all-purpose. Substitute by replacing two tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch, or simply use all-purpose and handle the dough lightly.
- Moderate oven350F. Drop cookies of this size take 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and just colored.
- YieldThe mousse fills a small ring mold and serves six to eight in slices. The cookie dough makes roughly two dozen.
Frozen mousses of this kind belong to the era between the hand-cranked ice cream freezer and the household refrigerator with a freezing compartment. Unlike ice cream, a mousse is never churned: whipped cream supplies the air, gelatin keeps the mixture from separating, and the whole thing is simply packed in salted ice and left alone. The pistachios and candied cherries pressed into the mold before filling recall a much older confectioners' practice, in which a chilled mold was lined with decoration so the pattern appeared on the finished surface.