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Pineapple Mousse
Place in a saucepan with one cup grated pineapple, half a cup of sugar, one-fourth cup of water, and simmer for five minutes. Add juice of half a lemon; take from fire; cool, stir in one cup of whipped cream or one-fourth cup gelatine (dissolved in one-fourth cup of water), pack the mould round about with ice, and let stand two hours.
A period ice-packed mousse, written in the telegraphic style of a book that assumed the cook already knew the drill. Two things in it need translating before you start: the gelatine measure and the mould packing.
- The missing subjectThe recipe opens "Place in a saucepan" with nothing to place, and the "with" implies a further ingredient that has been lost where this page was separated from what preceded it. What survives is one cup grated pineapple, half a cup of sugar and one-fourth cup of water.
- Fresh pineapple and gelatineRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatine and will leave the mousse slack. The five-minute simmer is what makes the recipe work, so do not shortcut it or fold in extra raw fruit at the end.
- That quarter cup of gelatineA quarter cup of modern granulated gelatine would set the mixture to rubber, and a quarter cup of dry powder could not dissolve in a quarter cup of water in any case, so the figure more likely refers to the dissolved liquid, or to a fraction of a boxed quantity, than to dry powder. The measure is genuinely ambiguous; about one envelope (2 1/2 tsp) is a defensible reading for this quantity of fruit.
- Cream or gelatine, not either at randomWith whipped cream you get a true mousse, light and short-keeping. With gelatine alone you get a firm pineapple jelly. Using both is one option: gelatine for structure, cream folded in once the mixture is cool and syrupy but not set.
- Cool means coolIf the fruit syrup is still warm the whipped cream will deflate on contact. Bring it down to room temperature or below before folding.
- Packing the mouldIce alone sits at 32F and will only chill the mould; this recipe specifies ice and nothing else. The period method for still-frozen desserts was ice layered with rock salt, which drops the bath well below freezing. A modern freezer will do the job, though it works more slowly than a salt-and-ice bath, so allow longer than the stated two hours if the centre is still soft.
- YieldAbout a pint of finished mixture, serving four in small moulds or coupes.
Mousse in a cookbook of this period often meant a still-frozen dessert: no churning, no dasher, just a sealed mould buried in ice and salt while the cook got on with the rest of dinner. The pineapple sections of such books swelled in the decades around 1900, when canned and grated pineapple from Hawaii and the Caribbean turned a luxury fruit into a pantry staple and gave home cooks a reliable, year-round supply of sweetened fruit pulp. Gelatine was going through the same shift, moving from long-boiled calf's foot to packaged granules, which is why measures for it in books of this era are so inconsistent and why one recipe will call for a box, another for a spoonful. The pairing of pineapple and gelatine also generated a familiar piece of kitchen lore, that the fruit refuses to set, which is true only of the raw fruit and is quietly solved here by five minutes over the fire.