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Chocolate (Cups sugar cup thin cream cup)
1½ cups sugar 1 cup thin cream 1/4 cup cold water 1 teaspoon vanilla ¼ teaspoon salt whip from 3 cups cream 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine Melt chocolate; add sugar and one cup cream; boil one minute. Mix gelatine with cold water, add to boiling mixture; when cool, add flavoring, salt and whip from cream. Pour into mold, pack in equal parts of ice and salt, let stand four hours. See colored illustration, Plate XVIII, opposite.
This is a still-frozen chocolate mousse of the sort made before mechanical freezers: no churning, just a gelatine-stabilised cream mixture packed in ice and salt. It behaves much like a modern semifreddo.
- Chocolate quantityThe amount of chocolate has not survived in the ingredient list, though the method directs melting it first. No figure can be recovered from the page itself; any quantity used is a modern guess, not the book's own.
- Thin creamThin cream in this period is generally reckoned at roughly 18-20 percent fat, closest to today's light cream; half-and-half is thinner than that. The recipe does not specify which cream is whipped, but the 3 cups are best taken as heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks only so it folds in without breaking.
- SaltThe printed page gives a quarter teaspoon of salt, which is what our text now reads.
- Granulated gelatineOne tablespoon is a little more than a standard 1/4-ounce envelope (about 2 1/4 teaspoons). Softening it in the cold water first, as directed, matters: added dry to a hot mixture it clumps rather than dissolving. It is here for structure, not flavour, and keeps the mousse sliceable rather than icy.
- Cool before foldingThe hinge of the recipe. If the chocolate base is still warm when the whipped cream goes in, the cream deflates and the finished mousse freezes dense and grainy. Cool it to room temperature but not to the point where the gelatine sets.
- Ice and salt in place of a freezerEqual parts crushed ice and coarse salt by volume brings the pack well below 32F, which is what freezes a mould that is never stirred. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job; allow six hours or more in a covered metal mould rather than four.
- Mould and unmouldingPack the mixture tightly to avoid air pockets, and cover the seam with a strip of buttered paper if you are using ice and salt, since brine that seeps in will ruin the surface. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn out.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of finished mousse, serving eight to ten in the small portions this kind of rich frozen sweet expects.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's, found it profitable to put a full general cookbook behind its product. The frozen dishes chapter belongs to the moment when ice-and-salt packing was still the household norm, and "mousse" in American books of this date usually means a still-frozen whipped-cream sweet rather than the chilled unfrozen kind that later took the name. The book carried colored plates, of which this recipe cites one.