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Maple Mousse
1 pint thick cream 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice 1/2 cup sultanas 1/2 cup maple syrup Wash, drain and soak the raisins in the syrup for several hours; then strain the syrup into the cream. Whip to a stiff froth; add the raisins and lemon juice and turn into a freezer without the beaters. Surround by equal parts of salt and ice and let stand until firm.
A still-frozen mousse: no churning, no custard, no eggs. The only technical demand is getting the cream stiff enough that it holds air while it freezes.
- The hinge: whip cold, whip firstSweetened liquid cream whips slowly and can break. Chill the bowl, beaters and cream hard, whip to soft peaks, then add the strained syrup in a stream and continue to firm peaks. Overbeaten cream turns grainy and the mousse freezes coarse.
- "Thick cream"Period thick cream is roughly modern heavy or whipping cream, somewhere around 36 percent fat or above. A pint is 2 cups, which should whip up to roughly a quart of finished mousse, enough for about six.
- SultanasGolden raisins, seedless and paler than the ordinary sort. Any raisin works; the soak in syrup is what matters, since unsoaked dried fruit freezes into small stones.
- The soakSeveral hours is not padding. The fruit plumps and gives up its flavour to the syrup, and the syrup that goes into the cream is thinner and better tasting for it. Overnight in the refrigerator is fine.
- "A freezer without the beaters"The metal can of a hand-cranked ice cream freezer, used here as a plain mould. A loaf tin or a covered metal container does the same job; press a sheet of plastic against the surface before the lid goes on.
- Salt and ice, or just the freezerEqual parts rock salt and crushed ice packed around the can drops the brine well below freezing and will set the mousse in a few hours; the recipe simply says to let it stand until firm. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job, with no packing and no drainage to manage, though it may take longer.
- The lemon juiceHalf a tablespoon against a half cup of maple syrup is there to cut sweetness, not to flavour. Add it at the end with the raisins; acid stirred into cream early makes it thicken unevenly.
- ServingThe mousse may set quite firm. If it is too hard to scoop, let it stand a few minutes at room temperature first.
Mousse, in the frozen-dessert chapters of early twentieth-century American cookbooks, generally meant something quite specific: sweetened whipped cream frozen without stirring, as against ice cream, which was churned, and sherbet, which was water-based. It was the dessert for a household that owned a freezer can but no patience for cranking, and it sits alongside a run of similar cream-and-flavouring variations. Maple was a natural flavouring for a northern American kitchen, and the syrup carried both the sugar and the flavour in one ingredient. The salt-and-ice packing described here is the same chemistry that ran household freezers before mechanical refrigeration reached domestic kitchens in the 1920s and 1930s: salt dissolving in melting ice pulls the brine down well below the freezing point of water.