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Pineapple Mousse
1 pint thick cream Juice of 1/2 lemon 1 pint pineapple juice and pulp Mix the ingredients thoroughly; chill and whip until stiff. Let stand in ice and salt for three hours or more. 1 cup powdered sugar
The loose-leaf format has scrambled the ingredient list around the method here; read it as 1 pint thick cream, 1 pint pineapple juice and pulp, juice of half a lemon, and 1 cup powdered sugar. It is a still-frozen mousse, which means no churning and no custard.
- Whip the cream firstCream will not whip stiff once a pint of juice and pulp is stirred into it. Whip the cold cream to soft peaks with the sugar, then fold in the chilled pineapple and lemon juice. That order is the difference between a mousse and a bowl of sweet pink liquid.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or whipping cream, 36 percent fat or better. Older "thick cream" was often richer still; avoid anything labelled light or whipping-blend, which will not hold air against that much fruit.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar on shelves now. Either works; superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match.
- Pineapple juice and pulpCanned pineapple, widely available by the early twentieth century, is heated in processing and gives a clean result; the recipe does not say which was intended. Raw fresh pineapple carries active bromelain, a protease that can turn dairy noticeably bitter over hours in the freezer; if using fresh, simmer the juice and pulp briefly and cool before folding in.
- Ice and saltThe recipe gives no proportions. Period practice for still-freezing was to pack a covered mold in crushed ice and coarse rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one of salt, and this recipe allows three hours or more. A modern freezer does the same work: pack into a chilled loaf pan or mold, cover the surface with parchment, and freeze four to six hours until firm.
- No churningA mousse in this sense is a still-frozen dessert; the whipped cream supplies the air an ice cream machine would otherwise beat in. Do not stir it while it sets, or you will lose the texture the whipping was for.
- ServingAbout a quart and a half, serving eight. Let it stand five to ten minutes before unmolding and slicing; frozen cream this rich is unpleasantly hard straight from a modern freezer, which runs colder than an ice-and-salt pack.
By the time this book was assembled, "mousse" had a settled meaning in American frozen-dessert chapters: sweetened whipped cream, flavored and frozen without stirring, sitting between the churned ice creams and the water ices. It was often said to suit a kitchen without a crank freezer, or a cook who wanted the oven and the range free, since the mold could be buried in ice and salt and forgotten for an afternoon. Pineapple appears constantly in cookbooks of this era because canned Hawaiian pineapple had become cheap and reliable in a way the fresh fruit never was on the mainland, and its acidity gave a flat, very rich cream something to push against. The lemon juice does the same job, sharpening the fruit.