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Chicken Mousse
1 cup chicken stock teaspoon salt paprika and celery salt 1 cup cold cooked chicken 2 teaspoons granulated gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water 1 cup beaten cream 1 tablespoon chopped olives 2 egg whites Heat chicken stock; add seasoning, gelatine which has been soaked in cold water. When dissolved, add chicken finely chopped, beaten cream; beat well; cut and fold in the beaten whites; pour into buttered molds and chill for two or three hours. Serve as a salad with mayonnaise.
This is a cold-set gelatine mousse in which raw egg whites are folded into a mixture that is never cooked after they go in. That is the problem, and it is not one that a change of technique fixes.
- The raw whites never reach a safe temperatureThe stock is heated only enough to dissolve the gelatine, then chicken and cream cool it further before the beaten whites are folded in. Nothing after that point is heated at all; the mousse simply chills in the mold. Raw egg white carries a real, if small, Salmonella risk, and a two- or three-hour chill does nothing to reduce it.
- Hours in the danger zoneAssembled off the heat -- A cup of cooked chicken and a cup of cream are combined with the stock off the heat, then folded, molded and chilled for two or three hours. A dense molded mixture takes time to cool through, and it is served cold with mayonnaise. It is a dish written for a household with a cold larder and different expectations about egg-borne illness.
- Who should not eat it at allAnyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised should not be served an uncooked-egg mousse under any circumstances. If you want a chicken mousse, use a current recipe written for modern egg handling.
- Reading the ingredient listThe verbatim text appears to have lost some fractions in transcription: 'teaspoon salt' was probably a half or quarter teaspoon, and the paprika and celery salt are given without quantity, which is common in books of this date. 'Beaten cream' means cream whipped to soft peaks; whether the cup is measured before or after whipping is not clear from the text.
- Granulated gelatineTwo teaspoons of the granulated gelatine of 1907 is roughly a modern envelope's worth of setting power for about three cups of mixture, but strengths were not standardised then and are not directly comparable now. This is worth knowing for reading the recipe rather than for making it.
Molded mousses and "chicken jellies" were a fixture of the American entrée course from the 1880s through the 1920s, when commercial granulated gelatine turned a laborious calf's-foot stock into something a cook could measure out of a packet. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Boston chocolate firm and written by Maria Willett Howard, belongs squarely to the Boston Cooking School tradition of the period: measured ingredients, pale creamy textures, and a fondness for cold molded dishes that could be prepared ahead and turned out whole for luncheon. The instruction to "serve as a salad with mayonnaise" places it in a genre that has largely vanished — the savory gelatine salad, which used leftover roast fowl and a little chopped olive for color and salt, and which depended on a cold pantry and a household that ate its molded dishes the same day they were made.