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Coffee Mousse
1/4 cup strong, clear coffee 1/2 cup sugar Mix, chill and whip until stiff. Put in mold, completely filling mold. Pack mold in equal parts crushed ice and rock salt. Let stand 3 or 4 hours. This will fill a 1-lb. baking powder can and serve four or five people.
— Mrs. Howard Manning
A still-frozen mousse from the era before mechanical refrigeration, set in a can buried in salted ice. As printed, the ingredient list is incomplete, so read the notes before you start.
- The missing ingredientCoffee and sugar alone will not whip stiff. A cream measure appears to have dropped out of the type here, as happens in community cookbooks. The stated yield -- a 1-lb. baking powder can, four or five servings -- suggests something on the order of a cup of heavy cream once whipped, but treat the amount as genuinely unknown rather than assuming the printed line is complete.
- Whip cold, and only to soft peaksWhip cold -- Chilling the mixture before whipping is the hinge instruction. Cream at room temperature will not hold air. The recipe says to whip until stiff; stop there, since cream taken past that point in a sweetened mixture breaks into butter grains that freeze hard and gritty.
- "Completely filling mold"This is not fussiness. Any air space left at the top lets the surface freeze into a coarse, crystalline crust, since nothing stirs the mixture during freezing.
- A 1-lb. baking powder canRoughly a 2-cup capacity, straight-sided with a friction lid. Any 2-cup mold or loaf pan works, covered tightly with foil and pressed flush against the surface.
- Ice and rock saltEqual parts by volume is a lot of salt by modern standards but correct for the method: the salt drives the brine below 32F so the mousse actually freezes rather than merely chilling. Use coarse rock salt, not table salt, and set the bucket where the meltwater can drain.
- Three or four hoursThat is the timing for a packed ice bucket, which must be re-iced as it melts. A home freezer will do the same job, though it may take several hours longer; there is no churning either way, so the freezing time is not critical.
- The coffee"Strong, clear" means a concentrated brew, strained free of grounds. A quarter cup has to carry the flavor of the whole mixture, so it needs to be well above ordinary drinking strength, and any sediment shows as grey specks in the frozen mousse.
- ServingFour or five small portions, as stated. Dip the mold briefly in warm water and turn it out; slice with a warmed knife.
Mousse in American cookbooks of this period meant something specific: a sweetened whipped-cream mixture frozen without stirring, as distinct from ice cream churned in a crank freezer or a water ice frozen hard. Because it needed no dasher, it could be packed in whatever cylindrical vessel a kitchen already had, and here that vessel is an emptied 1-lb. baking powder can. Coffee flavoring appears alongside the vanilla, caramel and maple mousses that fill the same chapters.