Home › Frozen Desserts › Cherry Mousse
Cherry Mousse
To a pint of double cream add three tablespoons of best confectioner's sugar, a cup of cherry juice and a drop or two of almond extract. Chill on ice, then whip until stiff. Turn into a mold, cover securely and bury in a pan of ice and salt for two hours.-Mary F. Snider.
A still-frozen mousse from the era before home freezers: the cream is whipped, molded, and set in a brine of ice and salt rather than churned. Two things decide whether it works — the temperature of the cream and how you handle the juice.
- Whip the cream first, then foldAs written, the juice goes in before whipping, and a cup of thin liquid in a pint of cream will keep it from ever reaching stiff peaks. Whip the cream with the sugar to firm peaks, then fold in the chilled cherry juice a little at a time.
- Double creamHere this most likely means ordinary heavy cream rather than the British 48 percent product; look for 36 percent fat or better. Avoid anything labeled whipping cream at 30 percent, and avoid ultra-pasteurized if you have a choice — it whips less willingly and holds less air.
- Confectioner's sugarModern powdered sugar contains about 3 percent cornstarch, which is harmless here and slightly helps stabilize the foam. Three tablespoons is a restrained amount; taste after folding in the juice and add more if your cherry juice is tart.
- Cherry juiceMost likely the syrup drained from canned or preserved cherries, which is sweet and thick, though the recipe does not say. Bottled unsweetened tart cherry juice is thinner and much sharper; reduce it slightly and sweeten it before folding, or the mousse will taste flat and freeze hard.
- Almond extractA drop or two means exactly that. Modern extract is potent — a quarter teaspoon in a pint of cream is already assertive.
- Ice and saltOld manuals give roughly three to four parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, which brings the brine well below freezing. Pack it around the mold, not over the lid, and top up as it melts.
- Seal the mold"Cover securely" is the instruction that matters. Salt brine seeping under the lid ruins the dessert outright; butter the rim, press greased paper or foil over the top, then clamp or tie the lid down.
- Or use the freezerA loaf pan or metal mold in a home freezer set at 0F will do the same job in four to six hours, longer than the two hours the brine needs. No stirring is required — the whipped cream supplies the air a churn would otherwise beat in.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished mousse, serving six. Unmold by dipping the form briefly in warm water and let it stand a few minutes before slicing.
Mousse in the American frozen-dessert vocabulary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant something specific: sweetened whipped cream, flavored and frozen without churning, as distinct from an ice cream (churned, often custard-based) or a water ice. Because it needed no crank freezer, only a mold and a bucket of ice and salt, it was the frozen dessert most within reach of a household with a delivered block of ice and no dairy equipment. The cherry juice here is the syrup left from a jar of put-up cherries. The attribution to Mary F. Snider suggests a reader contribution, the sort of signed recipe that magazines of the period printed in volume, building their books partly out of what subscribers already made at home.