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Mousse
1 pint sugar 1 pint water. Whites of 6 eggs Flavoring Boil the sugar and water together for about five minutes or until it threads; then drop slowly on the beaten whites of the eggs and continue beating until cold. Flavor to suit the taste with fruit or coffee and let it stand in a pail of chopped ice and rock salt for about five hours. Use equal parts of ice and salt.
This is a still-frozen meringue: hot syrup beaten into egg whites, flavored, then packed in ice and salt without churning. The ingredient line has clearly lost its sugar and water quantities in the loose-leaf format, so the proportions have to be supplied from standard practice.
- The missing quantitiesOnly "whites of 6 eggs" and "flavoring" survive; the sugar and water called for in the method are not given anywhere on the page. A standard Italian meringue for six whites (about 7 oz) runs to 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups sugar and about 1/3 cup water, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- "Until it threads"Thread stage is 223-235F on a candy thermometer, when a drizzle from the spoon falls in a fine strand rather than in drops. Five minutes of boiling is a rough guide only and depends entirely on your pan; go by temperature.
- The hinge: syrup temperature and pouring speedPour the syrup in a thin, steady stream down the side of the bowl onto whites already beaten to soft peaks, with the mixer running. Dumped in at once it cooks the whites into threads and the meringue will not hold air through freezing.
- Beat it genuinely cold"Continue beating until cold" means the bowl is at room temperature to the hand, usually 8-12 minutes in a stand mixer. Meringue folded into a mold while still warm weeps syrup and freezes in layers.
- Ice and saltEqual parts chopped ice and rock salt by volume makes a brine far colder than plain ice can manage (a salt-ice mix bottoms out around -6F), which is what allows an unchurned mixture to set. In a modern kitchen, pack the mixture into a chilled mold, cover the surface with parchment, and freeze; a home freezer at 0F will probably need longer than five hours.
- Raw egg whitesThe hot syrup raises the whites well above room temperature but does not reliably pasteurize them. If serving children, elderly guests, or anyone pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurized egg whites from a carton, which whip adequately with a little extra time.
- Flavoring amountsFor six whites, figure about 1/2 cup strong cold coffee or espresso, or 3/4 to 1 cup thick fruit puree, added at the end. Thin fruit juice waters the meringue down and gives you ice crystals; reduce or strain it first.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield; six whites with syrup will make something on the order of 1 1/2 quarts, enough for eight or so. Its texture is closer to frozen meringue than to ice cream, so it wants something sharp alongside, a berry sauce or macerated fruit.
Mousse is simply French for foam, and in period American cookbooks it names a frozen dessert that is never churned: air is beaten in beforehand, either as whipped cream or, as here, as meringue, and the mixture then sets undisturbed in a mold. That distinction mattered in a kitchen without mechanical refrigeration, where an ice cream demanded sustained work at the crank of a freezer while a mousse only needed a covered mold buried in a pail of chopped ice and rock salt — a job any household with an icebox and a delivery of block ice could manage. Loose-leaf cookbooks like this one were sold as binders of separate sheets so cooks could add their own pages and rearrange the sections, though the absence of sugar and water from the ingredient list could as easily be a transcription or printing loss.