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Chocolate Cookie Mousse
2 cups cream, whipped 2 stiffly beaten egg whites 2 tablespoons confectioner's sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla chocolate wafers Add sugar, vanilla and stiffly beaten egg whites to whipped cream. Alternate layers of whipped cream and chocolate wafers. Let stand in freezing compartment tray of electric refrigerator 10 minutes. Then place in freezing compartment of refrigerator and freeze three hours.
An icebox dessert from the era when a mechanical refrigerator was still a selling point. It cannot be made safely as written, and the reason is in the second ingredient.
- The raw egg whitesThe whites are folded in uncooked and the mixture is never heated at any stage. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and there is no step here that would reduce it.
- Freezing is not a kill stepThree hours in the freezing compartment holds bacteria in suspension rather than destroying them. A frozen dessert made with raw egg is no safer than an unfrozen one.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg desserts are specifically discouraged for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised, which is much of the guest list at any gathering. If you want a chocolate wafer mousse, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg product or no egg at all.
- The freezing compartment of 1930The freezing compartment -- The original assumes a small ice-cube compartment inside a domestic refrigerator, which ran considerably warmer than a modern freezer. A modern freezer at 0F sets a cream mixture harder and faster than the three hours quoted, which is one reason the timing in the text reads oddly today.
- Chocolate wafersThese are the thin, crisp, unsweetened-tasting chocolate biscuits sold for icebox cakes, not a sandwich cookie and not a chocolate-coated wafer. They are meant to soften into cake-like layers as they absorb moisture from the cream.
- YieldTwo cups of cream whipped, layered in a refrigerator tray, would serve roughly six to eight in small portions.
The chocolate wafer icebox cake belongs to the first decades of household electric refrigeration, when manufacturers and their recipe pamphlets were encouraging cooks to think of the freezing compartment as a place to make desserts rather than merely ice. The technique is the same throughout: crisp chocolate biscuits layered with sweetened whipped cream, left to stand until the wafers soften and the whole thing slices like cake. Calling it a mousse rather than a cake reflects the aerated cream and the beaten whites, and a dish assembled hours ahead, needing no oven and no last-minute attention, suited a hostess entertaining at cards. Raw egg white was a common lightener in such recipes in this period, folded into cold desserts without comment; the risk was not generally discussed in print at the time.