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Strawberry Mousse
Substitute two cups mashed berries for coffee, and proceed as for Coffee Mousse.
A single line that only makes sense alongside the Coffee Mousse it points to. What matters here is understanding what a mousse meant in this book: sweetened whipped cream, flavored, packed in a mold and frozen still, without churning.
- Read the base recipe firstThis is a variation, not a standalone formula. Find the Coffee Mousse entry for the cream quantity, sugar, and freezing time, then swap the coffee for two cups of mashed berries.
- Mousse means still-frozenIn cookbooks of this period a mousse was generally not stirred or churned like ice cream. The mold is packed in ice and salt and left alone; the whipped cream supplies the air that a crank would otherwise beat in.
- Ice and salt proportionsThe old packing ratio is roughly one part rock salt to three or four parts crushed ice, which holds the mold well below freezing. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job in a covered loaf pan or metal mold, though it will take longer.
- Strawberries carry waterMashed berries release a good deal of free juice, and water freezes hard and grainy. Mash the berries with the sugar, let them stand twenty minutes, then drain off some of the free juice or cook it down before folding the fruit into the cream.
- Sweeten past what tastes rightCold blunts both sugar and fruit acid. A mixture that tastes correct at room temperature will read flat and icy once frozen, so err generous with the sugar.
- Folding, not stirringWhip the cream to soft peaks only, then fold the fruit in with a spatula. Cream whipped stiff and then beaten with wet fruit collapses, and a collapsed mousse freezes into a dense pink brick.
- YieldDepends on the cream quantity in the base Coffee Mousse recipe. Unmold by dipping the form briefly in warm water and inverting.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it uses cross-references heavily to save print: one full method serves a dozen flavors. The word mousse is simply French for foam, and the still-frozen cream dessert it names is generally said to have entered American cookbooks in the late nineteenth century alongside the parfait and the bombe, all of them relying on a mold packed in ice and coarse salt rather than any mechanical cold. That dependence may be why frozen dishes occupy their own chapter in books of this era: the technique, not the flavoring, was the difficult part.