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Coffee Mousse
1 cup black coffee + teaspoon salt ½ cup powdered sugar Whip the cream, add sugar and coffee, turn mixture into a mold, pack in ice and salt, and let stand five hours.
Chocolate Mousse No. 2 Substitute four ounces melted chocolate for coffee in Coffee Mousse, pour into mold, pack in ice and salt, and let stand four hours.
This is a still-frozen mousse in the older sense: sweetened whipped cream packed in an ice-and-salt bath, never churned. The printed ingredient list has come down to us incomplete, so read the notes before starting.
- The missing creamThe method says "whip the cream" but no quantity survives in this printing. Comparable mousses in books of this period use a pint (2 cups) of heavy cream to a cup of liquid flavouring and half a cup of sugar; treat that as a reconstruction, not the original measure.
- "+ teaspoon salt"The fraction has not survived this printing; it was presumably a small one, a quarter or an eighth of a teaspoon. Err on the small side.
- Powdered sugarIn 1907 this meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match and dissolves in cream without grit.
- Coffee must be cold and strongA cup of thin, warm coffee will slacken whipped cream on contact. Brew it at double strength, chill it thoroughly, and fold it in a little at a time.
- Chocolate versionFour ounces of melted chocolate poured into cold whipped cream will seize into hard flecks. Cool the chocolate to just above body temperature and slacken it with a few spoonfuls of the cream before folding in the rest.
- Ice and saltThe mould is buried in a wooden bucket packed with roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, which drives the bath well below freezing. A domestic freezer will do the same work, though a covered metal mould or loaf pan may need somewhat longer than the five hours stated.
- Sealing the mouldTraditional mousse moulds had tight lids sealed with a strip of buttered paper or lard so the brine could not seep in. Modern cooks should wrap the pan in plastic and then foil, since salt water tastes of nothing good.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the reconstructed quantity of cream; with a pint, expect roughly a quart or a little more, serving six to eight. It sets softer than ice cream and slumps quickly; unmould straight from the cold and serve at once.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which may explain why a coffee recipe arrives with a chocolate variation attached and why the book carries more than one numbered chocolate mousse. "Mousse" here means something narrower than it does now: in American kitchens of the period a mousse was a still-frozen dessert of whipped cream and flavouring, packed in ice and salt and left alone, as distinct from an ice cream turned in a crank freezer or a parfait built on cooked egg yolks. The distinction mattered because still-freezing needed no machine and little labour, only a bucket, ice and coarse salt.