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Mousses Glacees
These ices often appear in the menus of banquets served at Delmonico's. They are whipped creams variously flavored; the froth is piled in glasses which are then set in a freezing box where it is allowed to freeze without any manipulation. Double cream must be used; that is cream skimmed from the top of cream. It should be cold to froth easily. Sweeten and flavor it like any ice cream preparation, and churn it in a pail with a whip churn, such as may be procured at any tinners, or with a Dover egg beater in a shallow bowl; take off the froth, place it on a fine seive to drain, and when all is whipped firm pile it in the glasses it is to be frozen and served in. Maraschino, chocolate, coffee, strawberry, lemon and vanilla creams are suitable but need to be more highly flavored than the ordinary ices. It will be found a great aid if all the operations can be performed in a cold place.
For the pastry cook who makes sponge cake frequently, it will remove the abtruseness from two or three examples following to observe that they are nearly the same as lady-finger batter before the flour is added.
A still-frozen dessert: cream is whipped, drained, packed into glasses and frozen untouched. No quantities are given, so treat the page as a method rather than a formula.
- The hinge: never stir it once packedThe whole point of a mousse glacée is that the air is beaten in beforehand and the mixture freezes undisturbed. Any stirring or scraping in the freezer collapses the froth and you end up with a dense sweetened ice.
- "Double cream"Cream skimmed from the top of standing cream, i.e. the richest fraction available. Modern heavy cream (about 36 percent fat) or UK double cream (higher still, around 48 percent) stands in for it; single cream or half-and-half will not hold the froth.
- Draining on the sieveWhipped raw cream weeps thin liquid, and any water left in freezes into grit. Drain the froth on a fine sieve for a few minutes and discard what runs through before packing the glasses.
- Whip churn and Dover egg beaterBoth are hand-operated beaters: the Dover is a hand-cranked rotary type, the whip churn a plunger worked in a tin cylinder. A stand mixer or a balloon whisk does the same work. The recipe asks for the froth to be whipped firm, but stop short of the point where cream turns buttery and freezes coarse.
- "A freezing box"An insulated ice-and-salt chest. A domestic freezer at 0F/-18C is the modern stand-in; filled glasses need roughly four to six hours to set firm, and should be covered so they do not pick up freezer odours.
- Flavour strongly, as instructedCold blunts sweetness and aroma, and the aeration dilutes both further. The advice to flavour more highly than ordinary ices is sound: taste the unfrozen froth and push it past what seems correct at room temperature.
- No quantities are givenSweetening and flavouring are left to the cook's ice-cream practice. Two to three tablespoons of sugar per cup of cream is a workable starting point, but the original genuinely specifies nothing.
- Work cold, and chill the glassesThe instruction about a cold place is not decoration; warm cream will not hold air. Chill bowl, beater, sieve and serving glasses, and use freezer-safe glass rather than thin stemware.
- The closing remarkThe reference to lady-finger batter before the flour is added points forward to the recipes that follow in the book, where whipped egg and sugar bases are used in place of plain cream. It is not part of this preparation.
Mousse glacee -- 'frozen froth' -- belongs to the family of still-frozen desserts that French kitchens built up before mechanical refrigeration, alongside biscuits glaces and parfaits: preparations aerated by hand so thoroughly that they could set in a mould without churning. The book's appeal to Delmonico's is a period marker. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the New York restaurant, whose kitchen was run by Charles Ranhofer from the 1860s to the 1890s, was a leading reference point for American caterers, and much of the vocabulary found in trade manuals of this kind reflects that influence. The insistence on cream skimmed from the top of cream reflects a dairy world of standing pans and hand skimming, where fat content was a matter of judgement rather than a printed figure, and the repeated advice to work in a cold room reflects a kitchen where ice was bought by the block and cold was a scarce resource to be husbanded.