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Mousse-de-Poulet, No. 5
Fill in the centre of the ring with mushrooms and sweetbread dressed with a French dressing.
If the button mushrooms (canned) are used, cut in quarters; if fresh mushrooms are at hand, remove the stems and peel the caps; break into pieces and sauté in a little hot butter; then add hot water or stock and let simmer until tender (fifteen or twenty minutes). Drain and chill before using.
This is the garnish and filling for the fifth of the book's chicken mousse variations: a chilled ring of mousse with a marinated mushroom-and-sweetbread salad heaped in the hollow. Almost everything that needs attention is assumed rather than stated.
- The sweetbread is a prior stepThe recipe treats cooked sweetbread as a thing already in the icebox. Veal sweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, then poached in acidulated water until firm and cooked through, trimmed of membrane, and chilled before they are cut up and dressed. Raw or barely warmed sweetbread should not go into a cold salad.
- French dressing of the periodThe term of the era usually meant a plain shaken vinaigrette, commonly something near three parts oil to one of vinegar or lemon juice with salt and pepper; the recipe itself gives no formula. Dress the mushrooms and sweetbread half an hour ahead so they take up the acid, then drain off what pools before filling the ring.
- Fresh mushroom timingThe recipe's fifteen to twenty minutes of simmering is longer than modern mushrooms need. Cremini or white caps are usually tender in five to eight minutes in stock after the initial saut hat limp that will not hold up against the mousse if taken further.
- Skip the peelingPeeling the caps was routine in older books, though it is no longer thought necessary. Wipe them clean and trim the stem end instead; you lose nothing but flavour by peeling today.
- Canned buttonsDrain and rinse them, since the packing brine is salty enough to throw off the dressing. They are already fully cooked, so they need no simmering at all -- quarter them and dress them cold, as directed.
- Serve it cold, and lateBoth the mushrooms and the sweetbread should be thoroughly chilled or they will soften the mousse where they touch it. Fill the centre of the ring only at the moment of serving; dressing that weeps into a chilled moulded mousse leaves the surface slick.
- QuantityNo amounts are given, and no mould size or number of servings is stated. As a rough guide only, something like half a pound of prepared mushrooms and one poached sweetbread will fill the centre of a ring of this kind.
Mousse cookery of this sort belongs broadly to American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, when a chilled savoury mousse unmoulded as a ring and filled in the hollow was one fashionable way to serve chicken at a luncheon or an evening supper. Sweetbreads and mushrooms were a common pairing for such fillings -- both were considered delicate rather than hearty, both were costly, and the two appear together in creamed dishes, patty shells, timbales and salads in the period's cookbooks. Canned button mushrooms, offered here on equal footing with fresh, mattered in a household where fresh cultivated mushrooms were seasonal and dear; the tin made the garnish available year round. That the recipe hands off the cooking of the sweetbread without a word is common in books of this kind, which generally assumed the basic preparation was given elsewhere.