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Two Eggs (One ounce of castor Sugar)
One ounce of castor Sugar.
Two ounces of loaf Sugar.
Angelica. A few Glacé Cherries.
Dissolve some of the jelly, pick about a dozen of the best strawberries. Mask some fancy dariole moulds with jelly; when partly set garnish the surface with strawberries and angelica leaves; coat the garnish with half-set jelly, and put on the ice to get firm. Beat up the eggs. Pick the remainder of the strawberries, put them in a basin, crush them with a wooden spoon, and rub them through a fine hair sieve. Make about one gill of syrup with the loaf sugar. Put the fruit pulp, syrup, eggs and maraschino in a copper bowl, and whisk over a saucepan of boiling water.
Dissolve the gelatine, previously soaked in water, and strain into the pulp, etc. Keep stirring over the hot water until the mixture binds; then take it off, and beat a little longer over some crushed ice. When sufficiently cool, fill up the moulds and leave them on the ice until quite set.
Immerse the moulds in tepid water, turn out neatly on a dish, garnish with chopped wine jelly and some glacé cherries, and serve.
This is a cold strawberry mousse set in lined dariole moulds — an Edwardian entremets froid. The printed ingredient list has been cut short in the original, so several quantities have to be judged by eye.
- Missing quantitiesThe heading gives only the two sugars; the strawberries, jelly, gelatine and maraschino are named in the method but never measured. As a working scale, a dozen strawberries for the garnish plus about 12 oz for the pulp, roughly half an ounce of gelatine, and a tablespoon of maraschino suit one gill of syrup and two eggs. Treat these as reconstruction, not the author's figures.
- SugarsCastor sugar is superfine sugar. Loaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone or pressed block, used for syrup-making because it was the cleanest sugar available; ordinary granulated does the same job now.
- A gillIn a British book of this date a gill is 5 fl oz, so the syrup is 2 oz sugar dissolved in water and boiled to about 5 fl oz.
- The hinge: cook the egg base properlyWhisking whole eggs, pulp and syrup over boiling water until the mixture "binds" means bringing it to roughly 160-165F (71-74C), thick enough to coat the whisk. That is also the range at which egg is generally reckoned safely cooked; the set itself comes from the gelatine. Much above it and the eggs risk scrambling in the acid fruit. Use a bowl that clears the water and take it off the moment it thickens.
- Gelatine"Previously soaked in water" fits sheet or leaf gelatine, which is still soaked and wrung out before dissolving, though powdered gelatine is likewise soaked first. If using powder, bloom it in a few tablespoons of cold water instead. Strain it in warm, and stir it into a warm base — added to a cold mixture it can string.
- Copper bowlCalled for because copper conducts fast and evenly over a bain-marie. Stainless steel or glass works; the copper matters here for heat, not for the egg-white chemistry it is usually credited with.
- Masking the mouldsDariole moulds hold about 3-4 fl oz. Chill them hard first, run in a little half-set jelly and turn to coat, then set the strawberry slices and angelica against the wall before locking them in with more jelly. Everything must be cold or the design slides.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, cut into leaf shapes — once a standard confectioner's green. It is now a specialist item; some cooks substitute thin strips of candied citron or simply leave the fruit unadorned.
- UnmouldingTepid water means a two- or three-second dip, no more. Any longer and the masking jelly melts and the pattern runs down the plate.
- YieldAbout six small moulds, one per person, served straight from the ice.
Books published under the "high class cookery" banner around the turn of the twentieth century are often associated with the British cookery-school movement — Edinburgh, Glasgow and London schools training young women for professional service — and they taught the French repertoire as it was practised in large private houses. This dish belongs to the family of cold sweets that Escoffier's generation catalogued as mousses and crèmes: a fruit pulp, a cooked egg sabayon, gelatine, and a lined mould whose glossy jelly casing was the whole point of the exercise. The maraschino is the clear liqueur distilled from Marasca cherries with their stones, long associated with Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, a fixture of Victorian confectionery; the candied angelica leaves and glacé cherries are the standard green-and-red garnish vocabulary of the period, used at a time when out-of-season colour on a dessert had to be manufactured rather than bought. The reliance on "the ice" throughout suggests a kitchen cooled by ice rather than by mechanical refrigeration.