Mousse
1/2 pint cream beaten stiff 1 cup fruit (mashed or cut fine) 3/4 cup sugar Mould, pack in ice and salt, and let stand 3 or 4 hours. 1 cup cream
— Mrs. Hiram B. Gibbs
This is a still-frozen mousse — no custard, no churning, just sweetened fruit folded into whipped cream and left to set hard in a salted ice bath. The instructions assume a cook who already owns a mousse mould and knows how to pack a freezing tub.
- The two cream measurementsHalf a pint is one cup, so the trailing "1 cup cream" may be a printer's duplication of the first line rather than a second addition (it could equally be a stray line from a neighbouring recipe). Either way, treat the recipe as one cup of heavy cream, whipped to soft-stiff peaks.
- Cream that will actually whipUse heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above; ultra-pasteurized cream whips but holds less air. Chill the bowl and beaters, and stop while the cream still looks glossy — overbeaten cream turns grainy and the frozen mousse becomes buttery.
- Sugar is structural hereThree-quarters of a cup to one cup of cream reads as very sweet, but without eggs or churning the sugar is what keeps the mixture from freezing into a solid brick. Cutting it much below half a cup gives a hard, icy block.
- Fold, do not stirMash or finely chop the fruit, mix it with the sugar first so the sugar dissolves, then fold that into the whipped cream in two or three additions. Stirring collapses the air and the mousse sets dense.
- Wet fruitStrawberries, peaches and raspberries all release juice, and free water freezes as ice crystals. Drain the macerated fruit before folding, or accept a coarser texture.
- Packing in ice and saltThe mould is buried in roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, which drops the bath well below freezing; the mould is sealed and never stirred. Cover the tub with sacking or a towel and drain off meltwater as needed.
- A freezer insteadA modern freezer will set the mousse without a tub of ice, though in still air it usually needs longer than the recipe's three to four hours. Press plastic wrap onto the surface, cover, and let the mousse temper 10 minutes at room temperature before unmoulding.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half once the cream is whipped — four to six small servings. Frozen mousse this rich is meant to be served in modest slices.
Mousse in an American church cookbook of this period generally means a frozen dish, not the chilled gelatine or chocolate mousse of later menus: the defining feature is that it is frozen still, packed in ice and salt without stirring, which is what separates it from ice cream churned in a freezer and from the egg-white-lightened parfait. Household manuals of the period treated mousses and parfaits among the ices a hostess could make without a crank freezer, needing only a tight-lidded mould and a tub of ice. Rock salt lowers the melting point of ice enough to pull heat out of the cream. The Philathea Cook Book, in the manner of subscription volumes assembled by a women's Bible class, credits each contribution by name, and Mrs. Gibbs's terse entry is typical -- written for readers assumed to know what a mould and a freezing tub were, and to need only the proportions.