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Fruit Mousses
Mix two cups of any fruit pulp, with powdered sugar to sweeten, with the whip from one pint cream. A small amount of lemon juice brings out the flavor of other fruits. Mold.
Pack and let stand in ice and salt four hours.
A still-frozen mousse: nothing is churned, so all the lightness has to come from the whipped cream and survive four hours in the ice. The instructions assume a household that packed its own freezer tubs, which is the main thing to translate.
- "The whip from one pint cream"Some older manuals mean the stiff froth skimmed off the surface as you whip, not the whole whipped volume: the foam was lifted onto a sieve and the thin cream that drained back was whipped again. In practice, whip a pint of heavy cream to soft-medium peaks and use it all; the yield is close enough.
- Fruit pulpThis means fruit pushed through a sieve — a smooth purée with no skins or seeds. Strawberry, raspberry, peach or apricot are typical choices for the two cups. Very watery fruit (melon, ripe pear) freezes hard and grainy because there is no churning to break up ice crystals.
- Sugar, unspecified on purpose"Powdered sugar to sweeten" leaves you to taste, but sugar also keeps the mixture soft. Figure 1/2 to 3/4 cup of fine sugar for two cups of purée, and sweeten the purée noticeably past pleasant — cold blunts sweetness sharply.
- Fold, do not stirThe hinge of the recipe. Chill the sweetened purée thoroughly first, then fold it into the cream in three additions. Adding cold purée to cold cream and working it quickly keeps the air in; a warm purée deflates the whip and you get a dense frozen block.
- Ice and saltThe mold was buried in a tub of crushed ice mixed with rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, which drops the bath well below freezing. Drain meltwater and top up ice as needed.
- A freezer insteadPack the mixture into a chilled metal mold or loaf pan, press plastic wrap on the surface, and freeze four to six hours. Because nothing is churned, no ice-cream machine is wanted; a metal container gives a firmer, cleaner set than glass.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in cool water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate. Let the mousse stand five to ten minutes before serving — at true freezer hardness the fruit flavor barely reads.
- Lemon juiceA tablespoon or so for two cups of purée. It does what the book claims, sharpening peaches, apricots and cherries in particular, and it also keeps pale fruits from browning.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, serving six to eight.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker; like many manufacturer cookbooks it combines house promotion with a broad general reference, which is why a book issued by a chocolate firm carries a full chapter of frozen dishes. By that date American cookery generally distinguished among frozen desserts: ice cream was churned in a crank freezer, as were water ices and sherbets, while a mousse or parfait was usually still-frozen, set in a sealed mold and buried in ice and salt without stirring. The ice came from the ice trade — natural ice cut from northern lakes in winter, and by this date manufactured plant ice as well — and the salt-and-ice bath was standard kitchen practice decades before an electric refrigerator was a plausible household purchase.