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Strawberry Mousse
1 quart ripe strawberries
3 tablespoons cold water
1½ cups sugar
3 tablespoons boiling water
2 cups heavy cream
1½ tablespoon lemon juice
Pinch of salt
½ tablespoon orange juice
2 tablespoons lemon gelatin
Wash, hull and chop the berries; blend with the sugar and let stand two hours; mash and rub through a coarse sieve. Soften the gelatin with cold water, dissolve in the boiling water and add to the berry pulp. Set the mixture into a pan of cold water and stir until it begins to thicken; fold in the stiffly whipped cream. Pour into a mold, cover, pack in equal quantities of salt and ice and let stand four or five hours.
A still-frozen mousse from the era before home freezers, set in a sealed mold and buried in salt and ice. The method translates easily; the gelatin does not, so read that point first.
- The gelatin"Lemon gelatin" here most likely means sweetened flavored dessert powder of the Jell-O type rather than plain gelatin. Two tablespoons is a fraction of a 3-oz box; if you substitute unflavored gelatin, use considerably less -- on the order of a teaspoon -- since plain gelatin sets much more strongly and the rest of the packaged product is sugar and flavoring.
- The juicesThe lemon and orange juice appear in the ingredient list but never in the method. Stir them into the sieved berry pulp with the dissolved gelatin — they are there to sharpen the sugar, which is heavy at 1½ cups.
- Macerating is not optionalThe two hours with sugar draws juice out of the berries and softens them enough to sieve. Skip it and you will be pushing raw fruit through mesh and losing most of the flavor to the pulp left behind.
- Catch the gelatin at the right momentThe hinge of the recipe: cool the fruit mixture over cold water only until it thickens to the consistency of unbeaten egg white. Fold the cream in too early and it thins and separates; too late and the set gelatin breaks into flecks that stay visible after freezing.
- Whipped cream"Stiffly whipped" means holding a firm peak but still smooth -- stop before it looks grainy. Two cups of cream roughly doubles in volume, which is what gives a frozen mousse its texture without churning.
- Freezing without a salt-and-ice packPacking a covered mold in equal parts crushed ice and coarse salt brings the surrounding brine well below the freezing point of water. A modern freezer does the same job: pour into a loaf pan or metal mold, press plastic wrap onto the surface, and freeze four to six hours until firm. If you do use a traditional mold, seal the seam with a strip of buttered paper so brine cannot seep in.
- ServingAbout 1½ quarts, serving eight. Dip the mold briefly in warm water to unmold, and let the mousse stand ten minutes at room temperature before serving — it is dense and eats better slightly softened.
A mousse in this period was defined by what it lacked: no crank, no dasher, no stirring during freezing. Where ice cream was churned to keep the crystals small, a mousse depended on whipped cream and a little gelatin to hold air in suspension while the mixture froze still — a technique that suited households with an ice chest and a mold but no ice-cream machine at hand. The salt-and-ice pack was ordinary kitchen equipment: salt lowers the melting point of ice, and the resulting brine draws heat out of the mold far faster than ice alone. The flavored gelatin is the modern intrusion here. Packaged sweetened gelatin desserts became a fixture of American cupboards in the first decades of the twentieth century, and cookbooks such as this one used them freely as a convenient combined sweetener, setting agent and flavoring — a small marker of how quickly commercial products worked their way into dishes that had once called for calf's-foot jelly or isinglass.