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Pineapple Mousse
1 tablespoon granulated gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 1 cup pineapple syrup 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup sugar 1 quart cream Heat one can pineapple, and drain. To one cup of the syrup, add gelatine soaked in cold water, lemon juice, and sugar. Strain and cool. As mixture thickens, fold in the whip from cream. Mould, pack in salt and ice, and let stand four hours.
A still-frozen gelatine mousse from the era before mechanical refrigeration: no churning, just whipped cream folded into a setting jelly and buried in an ice-and-salt pack. It works in a modern freezer with almost no adjustment.
- The hinge: dissolve the gelatine in hot syrupThe instruction to heat the canned pineapple and drain it exists to give you a cup of hot syrup. Granulated gelatine soaked in cold water will only melt fully in liquid at about 110-120F, so combine it with the syrup while the syrup is still hot, then strain and cool. Add cold syrup and you will get gritty threads through the mousse.
- Granulated gelatineThis is plain unflavoured gelatin, not a flavoured dessert mix. One tablespoon is roughly one and a third of today's quarter-ounce envelopes; older gelatine was somewhat less consistent in strength, so measure by the spoon rather than the packet.
- Canned pineapple, not freshFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and will leave the mousse permanently slack. Canned fruit and its syrup have been heated enough to destroy the enzyme, which is why the recipe specifies a can.
- "The whip from cream"Period practice was to whip cream in a shallow pan and skim the stiff froth off the top into a sieve, returning the unwhipped liquid to be beaten again. Whipping a quart of cream to soft peaks in a mixer is the usual modern substitute, though it will give rather more volume than the skimmed whip; stop short of stiff, or the mixture will be difficult to fold without deflating.
- Fold at the right momentWait until the strained syrup has cooled to the consistency of raw egg white before folding in the cream. Too warm and the cream melts into soup; fully set and it breaks into lumps you cannot smooth out.
- Salt and ice, or the freezerPacking a sealed mould in crushed ice mixed with rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, brings the pack well below freezing; this recipe allows four hours, which is in line with other still-frozen desserts. A domestic freezer at 0F does much the same work in four to six hours with the mould covered.
- SweetnessA cup of sugar on top of already-sweet canned syrup makes a very sweet dessert by current taste. The two tablespoons of lemon juice are there to cut it, and are not optional.
- YieldThe finished mixture is bulky: a quart of cream whipped, plus the jelly, will need more than a two-quart mould, and serves ten to twelve. It is rich enough that small portions are the point.
Frozen mousses of this kind sat between the ice cream and the jelly in turn-of-the-century American cookery: a sweetened, gelatine-stiffened base lightened with whipped cream and set hard without stirring, so that no ice-cream freezer and no one to crank it were required. Canned pineapple made the dish possible for ordinary households, having become cheap and widely available after Hawaiian canneries scaled up in the 1900s, and cookbooks of the period lean on it heavily for both fruit and syrup. The salt-and-ice pack described here is the same chemistry as the hand-cranked freezer, simply used to chill a mould rather than to churn one, and it remained the standard household method until electric refrigerators with freezing compartments became common in the 1920s and 1930s.