Home › Salad Dressings › Mousse-de-Poulet, No. 4
Mousse-de-Poulet, No. 4
Fill in the centre of the ring with diced cucumbers and sliced radishes, mixed with cream dressing. Garnish with cream dressing, using pastry bag and tube, and radishes cut to resemble roses.
This is the fourth in a run of finishing variations for a chicken mousse moulded in a ring; the mousse itself is made elsewhere in the book, and what appears here is only the filling and garnish. Read it as an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe.
- You need the base mousseNothing here tells you how to make the mousse-de-poulet; the page assumes you have the parent recipe, which is printed elsewhere in the book. A chicken mousse of this period would typically be cooked chicken pounded or ground fine, seasoned, bound with gelatin, and lightened with cream, but the specifics are not given here.
- What "cream dressing" meantIn turn-of-the-century American salad chapters this is usually a cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour, thinned with cream, or mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream. Either version pipes; a thin vinaigrette will not.
- Piping consistencyFor the pastry bag work the dressing must be stiff enough to hold a ridge. Mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream will pipe, but it softens as it warms, so work in a cool room and serve promptly.
- Salt the cucumbers firstDiced cucumber sheds a surprising amount of water once dressed. Salt it lightly, drain twenty minutes and pat dry, or the dressing in the centre of the ring will slacken into a puddle before the dish reaches the table.
- Radish rosesCut four or five shallow petals down the sides of a trimmed red radish, then drop into ice water for half an hour; the petals curl back on their own. This was standard garnish work of the period.
- TemperatureA gelatin mousse ring softens quickly. Unmould onto a chilled platter, fill and pipe at the last moment, and keep the assembled dish refrigerated until it is served.
Moulded mousses and ring-shaped chaudfroids belong to the era when a luncheon dish was judged as much by its outline as by its flavour. Gelatin, sold in reliable sheets and later in granulated packets from the 1890s onward, made it practical for a household cook rather than a professional to turn out something that held a shape, and books of this period print variation after variation on a single moulded base: fill the centre with peas, with lobster, with cucumber and radish, garnish differently each time. The radish rose and the piped border of dressing belong to the same decorative vocabulary, scaled down to a domestic pastry bag.