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Chocolate Mousse
2 squares unsweetened chocolate ½ cup powdered sugar 1 cup cream 3 tablespoons boiling water 3/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla ¾ tablespoon granulated gelatine 1 quart cream Melt chocolate, add powdered sugar, and gradually one cup cream. Stir over fire until boiling-point is reached, then add gelatine dissolved in boiling water, sugar, and vanilla. Strain mixture into a bowl, set in a pan of ice-water, stir constantly until mixture thickens, then fold in the whip from remaining cream. Mould, pack in salt and ice, and let stand four hours. 4 eggs
A still-frozen mousse from the era before mechanical refrigeration: no churning, no eggs, just a cooked chocolate base lightened with whipped cream and set hard in a packed mould. The hinge is the ice-water bath — the base must be cold and thickening before the cream goes in, or the whip collapses and the mousse freezes into a solid brick.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this uses 2 oz. Modern unsweetened bars are still commonly scored into 1 oz squares.
- Powdered sugarIn this book powdered sugar means a fine-grained granulated sugar, not today's cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match; ordinary granulated will dissolve in the hot chocolate without trouble.
- The sugar quantitiesAs printed, 1½ cups powdered sugar plus ¾ cup granulated makes an unusually sweet mixture for this amount of chocolate and cream, and one of the two figures may be a misprint. Treat them as uncertain and reduce if you prefer.
- Granulated gelatineThree-quarters of a tablespoon is 2¼ teaspoons, almost exactly one standard envelope of powdered gelatine. Sprinkle it over the three tablespoons of boiling water and let it swell before adding, and strain the base afterwards as directed to catch any undissolved grains.
- "The whip from remaining cream"Farmer means the stiff froth skimmed off the surface as you beat cold heavy cream, lifted away in batches while the thinner cream underneath is beaten again. With modern high-fat heavy cream you can simply whip the quart to soft peaks — stop well short of stiff, since the mixture stiffens further as it freezes.
- Salt and ice, or the freezerPacking a sealed mould in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt drives the temperature below freezing without churning; period instructions give varying proportions, commonly three or four parts ice to one of salt. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job: cover the mould tightly and give it four to six hours.
- TextureBecause nothing is churned, the mousse sets differently from ice cream. Let it stand at room temperature ten minutes before unmoulding and slicing.
- YieldA quart of cream plus the cup in the base makes a generous mould — ten to twelve servings.
Frozen mousse of this kind belongs to a family of American still-frozen desserts that filled the gap between hand-cranked ice cream and the moulded bombes of professional kitchens: no churn to turn, so a cook with ice, salt and a mould could produce something dinner-party grand while attending to the rest of the meal. The gelatine is doing quiet structural work, holding the whipped cream in suspension so the mixture freezes evenly instead of separating into a fatty crown over an icy base. Frozen desserts occupied a good deal of space in general cookbooks of the 1890s, which reflects how much cheap manufactured ice had changed home entertaining in northern American cities, and the mould in the ice bucket became an ordinary domestic ambition rather than a caterer's trick.