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Cherry Mousse
1 pint thick cream 1 cup cherry juice 2 drops almond extract Powdered sugar Mix the ingredients, sweetening to taste; chill and whip until stiff; then pack in ice and salt for three hours or more. Grape, raspberry and strawberry mousse may be made in the same way. Heat the fruit slightly before mashing and straining for the juice.
A still-frozen mousse: no churning, no custard, just sweetened cream and fruit juice set hard in a salt-and-ice pack. It works in a modern freezer with one change of order.
- Whip the cream firstAdding a full cup of juice to unwhipped cream thins it to the point where it may not hold air, though the original directs mixing first and whipping after. If you prefer the safer route, whip the cold cream to soft-stiff peaks with the sugar, then fold the chilled juice and extract in gently.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerPacking in ice and salt means burying a covered mould in a bucket of crushed ice mixed with rock salt, roughly three or four parts ice to one of salt by volume, which drops the bath well below 32F. A home freezer at 0F does the same job in a loaf pan covered with plastic film pressed to the surface; allow four to six hours.
- A pint of thick cream"Thick cream" here is heavy or double cream, at least 36 percent fat. A pint is two cups, which whips up to about a quart and yields six servings.
- Powdered sugarCalled for because it dissolves in cold cream without grittiness; modern confectioners' sugar contains a little cornstarch, which does no harm. Start at about half a cup and taste, remembering that freezing mutes sweetness noticeably.
- The cherry juiceSour or morello cherries give a sharper, deeper-coloured juice than sweet cherries, though the recipe does not specify. Heat the fruit only until it slumps and releases liquid, then mash and strain, and chill the juice thoroughly before it meets the cream.
- Two drops of almond extractNot a mistake or an under-measure. Almond extract shares its principal aroma compound with cherry kernels, and it overwhelms a delicate mixture very quickly, so the tiny quantity is deliberate.
- ServingLet the mousse stand in the refrigerator for ten to fifteen minutes before unmoulding and slicing.
In the frozen-dessert vocabulary of American cookbooks around 1900, the words were used with some consistency, though usage varied: an ice cream was churned, a sherbet or water ice was churned and largely fruit and sugar, and a mousse or parfait was a still-frozen mixture of whipped cream that needed no crank at all, though a parfait usually carried an egg-yolk and syrup base. That distinction mattered in a kitchen where freezing meant a wooden bucket, a block of ice broken up with an awl, and coarse rock salt bought by the sack to force the brine below the freezing point of water. A still-frozen mousse was the lazy option, and the elegant one: it could be packed in a mould, buried, and forgotten for three hours while the cook did something else, whereas an ice cream demanded steady turning at the crank. The instruction to heat the fruit slightly before straining is the same trick used for jelly-making, since warming ruptures the cells and gives far more juice than mashing raw fruit, and the note that grape, raspberry and strawberry may be substituted points to a formula meant to be adapted.