Home › Pudding Sauces › Strawberry Mousse
Strawberry Mousse
1 quart thin cream 1 box strawberries 1 cup sugar 1/4 box gelatine (scant) or 1 1/4 tablespoons granulated gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water 3 tablespoons hot water Wash and hull berries, sprinkle with sugar, and let stand one hour; mash, and rub through a fine sieve; add gelatine soaked in cold and dissolved in boiling water. Set in pan of ice-water and stir until it begins to thicken; then fold in whip from cream, put in mould, cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand four hours. Raspberries may be used in place of strawberries.
A still-frozen cream, set with a little gelatine and frozen without churning. The gelatine is what keeps it smooth, so the folding stage decides whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: catch the gelatine mid-setStir the sweetened purée over ice only until it thickens to the consistency of unbeaten egg white, then fold in the cream at once. Fold too early and the fruit sinks; too late and you get rubbery threads of set gelatine through the mousse.
- "Whip from cream"An older method: whip the cream partially, skim off the stiff froth that rises, reserve it, and re-whip what is left. Thin (light) cream as sold today, at roughly 18 to 20 percent fat, will not hold a whip; use cream of about 36 percent fat, whipped to soft peaks, bearing in mind that a quart of modern heavy cream gives considerably more whip than a quart of period thin cream yielded.
- A box of strawberriesA market box of this period was usually a quart, on the order of 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of berries, which should give roughly 1 1/2 cups of sieved pur\ba
- The gelatineA quarter of an old box is superseded; go by the alternative given. 1 1/4 tablespoons granulated gelatine is 3 3/4 teaspoons, a little more than 1 1/2 standard envelopes. Soak in the 2 tablespoons cold water until spongy, then dissolve in the hot water and strain into the purée.
- Salt and ice, or the freezerPacking a covered mould in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt (about 4 parts ice to 1 part salt by volume) freezes it hard in four hours. A modern freezer does the same in four to six hours; cover the mould tightly either way, since brine seeping under the lid ruins the mousse.
- Sieving the fruitThe hour of standing in sugar draws out juice and makes the mash easier to push through. A fine sieve, not a blender, keeps the seeds out; seeds left in freeze hard and read as grit.
- Yield and servingYield depends on how much whip the cream gives, so expect somewhere between about 1 1/2 and 2 quarts, serving eight to ten. Unmould onto a chilled dish and let it stand five minutes before slicing; straight from the ice it is too firm to taste of much.