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Strawberry Mousse
1 box strawberries 1 cup sugar 1/4 box or 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water 3 tablespoons boiling water. 1 quart cream Wash and hull berries, sprinkle with sugar and let stand one hour; mash and rub through fine sieve; add gelatine which has previously been soaked in the cold water and dissolved in the boiling water. Set in pan of ice water and stir until it begins to thicken; fold in whipped cream. Put into mold, cover, pack in salt and ice, 1 part salt, 3 parts ice; let stand 4 hours. Raspberries or peaches or shredded pineapple may be used instead of strawberries.
A still-frozen mousse: no churning, no custard, just sieved fruit puree set lightly with gelatine and lightened with a great deal of whipped cream. The whole thing hinges on catching the gelatine at the right moment.
- The hinge: fold at the right thicknessStir the sweetened puree over ice only until it thickens to the consistency of unbeaten egg white. Fold the cream in before it sets, or you get rubbery flecks of gelatine suspended in the mousse; leave it too thin and the cream separates into a foam layer as it freezes.
- A box of strawberriesA berry box of the period is usually a quart, roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, which should yield somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sieved puree. Match that volume if your berries come in different packaging.
- Gelatine"1/4 box or 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine" is one standard envelope of unflavored powdered gelatin, about 1/4 oz or 7 g. Bloom it in the 2 tablespoons cold water for five minutes, then dissolve in the boiling water and stir until no grains remain.
- 1 quart creamHeavy or whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks before folding, not stiff. A quart of cream doubles in volume, so the finished mixture is large: figure on about 2 1/2 quarts and 10 to 12 servings.
- Sieving mattersA fine sieve removes the seeds, which otherwise freeze hard and gritty. Push the pulp through with a rubber spatula rather than pureeing seeds and all in a blender.
- Salt and ice packingThe mold is buried in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt, 1 part salt to 3 parts ice, which drops the brine below 0F and freezes the mousse solid without stirring. A well-sealed mold in a home freezer does the same job, though it wants longer than four hours; press plastic wrap directly on the surface to keep ice crystals off.
- Sealing the moldIf you pack in ice, the mold must be genuinely watertight or salt brine seeps in. One old practice was to run a strip of fat or butter around the lid seam before burying it.
- Fruit substitutionsPeaches and raspberries behave the same way. Fresh pineapple does not: its bromelain digests gelatine, so cook the pineapple briefly before adding it or the mousse will never set.
The New Royal Cook Book was issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the great American promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and its frozen-dessert chapter reflects a kitchen that had ice delivered but no mechanical freezer. A mousse in this sense is not the chilled gelatine dessert of later decades but a still-frozen cream: because nothing stirs it, the whipped cream and a whisper of gelatine have to do all the work of keeping it smooth, a job that churning does in ice cream. Granulated gelatine sold in boxes of four envelopes was by this time a familiar convenience, having replaced the calf's-foot stock and sheet isinglass earlier cooks had to clarify themselves. The salt-and-ice ratio given here is the conventional packing proportion of the era.