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Peach Mousse and Russe
To each cup of peach pulp (fresh or canned) allow a heaping teaspoon of gelatine (two cups of pulp make a generous quantity). Dissolve gelatine in one-third cup of cold water, then place over steam to dissolve, and strain into the peach pulp. Sweeten well, add a tablespoon of lemon juice and a little raspberry or strawberry syrup. Coat the lining of a fancy mould with a tablespoon of melted gelatine, then pour in the mousse, pack well, cover with ice, and freeze six hours.
Make the Russe in similar manner but fold in at the last a pint of whipped cream and the grated rind of a lemon instead of the lemon juice. Use also a little almond flavouring. (These may be used as filling for a mould lined with vanilla ice cream.)
A still-frozen gelatine dessert from the era of the ice-packed mould, before home freezers. Two things decide whether it succeeds: how much gelatine you use, and how you freeze it.
- Gelatine strength has changedGelatine strength -- Household gelatine sold around 1900 was less standardised than today's granulated product, so quantities in period recipes are a rough guide at best. A modern quarter-ounce envelope is about 2 1/4 level teaspoons and sets two cups of liquid firmly; for a frozen mousse you want less, not more, or the result turns rubbery rather than creamy. Treat the "heaping teaspoon per cup of pulp" as an upper limit.
- Softening and dissolvingSprinkle the gelatine over the third-cup of cold water and let it stand five minutes before setting it over steam. "Place over steam" means a bowl over simmering water, not direct heat; gelatine boiled hard or held long at high heat can lose setting power.
- "Cover with ice, and freeze six hours"This assumes a wooden freezer tub or ice chest packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three or four parts ice to one of salt, which brings the brine well below freezing. In a modern freezer the same mould will firm up in four to six hours and can simply be left overnight.
- Peach pulpFresh peaches should be peeled, stoned and pressed through a sieve or briefly puréed; canned peaches should be drained well first, and the syrup accounted for when you sweeten. Two cups of pulp is roughly three or four large fresh peaches.
- Sweeten well, and mean itFreezing dulls both sweetness and acidity. The mixture should taste slightly too sweet and too tart at room temperature if it is to taste balanced frozen.
- Coating the mouldThe tablespoon of melted gelatine swirled around the chilled mould forms a thin skin that releases cleanly. To unmould, dip the outside in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a cold plate.
- The RusseHere "Russe" simply signals the addition of whipped cream, folded in at the very end, off the heat, once the peach mixture is cool and just beginning to thicken. Fold into warm liquid and the cream deflates. Almond flavouring means a few drops of extract, no more.
- YieldTwo cups of pulp gives about six servings of the mousse; the Russe, with a pint of whipped cream folded in, will serve eight to ten.
Frozen moulded desserts of this kind were popular in American kitchens once cheap, reliable powdered gelatine became widely available in the 1890s, though moulded and iced creams, and gelatine-set desserts using isinglass, are documented well before then. They were made in an ice-and-salt pack rather than churned in a freezer, and without a dasher to beat air in, the gelatine and later the whipped cream are what keep the mixture from setting into a solid block of fruit ice. The name "Russe" is generally traced to the nineteenth-century charlotte russe and to the broader use of the term for dishes iced and moulded; by this period cookbook writers used it loosely to mean a cream-enriched version of a plain preparation. The suggestion of lining the mould with vanilla ice cream is a domestic echo of the confectioner's bombe, a showpiece that professional caterers built in the same fancy tin moulds.