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Strawberry Mousse
Hull a pint of ripe strawberries and rub them through a fine sieve; add a cup of powdered sugar and an ounce of dissolved gelatine; set in a cool place until the mixture begins to thicken. Beat the whites of five eggs and stir them lightly into the mixture. Turn into a wetted mold, cover securely and bury in a tub of finely chopped ice and salt. Set aside for three hours and turn out.
This is a still-frozen mousse from the era before mechanical refrigeration, and its structure depends entirely on raw egg white that is never heated at any stage. The notes below explain why the recipe cannot be followed as printed, along with what its older terms mean.
- Why it fails: uncooked egg whiteFive whites are folded in raw and the mixture goes straight into a mold packed in ice. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it either — it merely holds it dormant until the mousse softens on the plate. A current recipe using pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue base should be used instead.
- Three hours at cellar temperatureThree hours in ice and salt, but a warm start -- An ice-and-salt bath holds a mold well below freezing, but the mixture spends its earlier stage sitting in a "cool place" until it thickens — larder temperature, not refrigeration. That is exactly the window in which a sugared fruit-and-egg mixture is most hospitable to bacterial growth.
- An ounce of gelatineThe quantity is genuinely ambiguous. Period gelatine was sold in sheets and in shredded form of variable strength, and an ounce by weight of modern powdered gelatine would set a pint of purée to rubber. The recipe assumes the cook knows her own brand.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage the term generally meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. The distinction matters here because the sugar is dissolving into fruit purée rather than being creamed.
- A pint of strawberriesBerries were measured by volume, not weight; a pint box is roughly 12 oz. Sieving rather than blending removes the seeds.
- Ice and saltRock salt mixed through chopped ice drops the bath well below freezing, which is what allows a covered, unchurned mold to set solid. The mold is sealed tightly so brine cannot seep in — a real risk when a tub is packed for three hours.
In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "mousse" in the frozen-dessert chapter meant something specific: a still-frozen cream or fruit purée, lightened with beaten whites or whipped cream and set in a sealed mold buried in ice and salt, with no churning or stirring at all. It sat between the labor-intensive hand-cranked ice cream and the plain water ice, and its appeal was that it needed no freezer and no arm work — only a tub, a mold, and someone to repack the ice. Gelatine appears here too, and cookbooks of the period are full of it, though its exact role in an unchurned mixture is a matter of inference. Strawberries, cheap and abundant for a few weeks in early summer, were the obvious flavoring for a dessert whose whole point was to be cold in June.