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Mousse Marron
1 quart vanilla ice cream 1 teaspoon granulated gelatine 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 cup water Whites two eggs 11½ cups prepared French chestnuts 1 pint cream 1½ tablespoon vanilla Cook sugar and water five minutes, pour on to beaten whites of eggs, dissolve gelatine in one and one-half tablespoons boiling water, and add to first mixture. Set in a pan of ice-water, and stir until cold; add chestnuts, and fold in whip from cream and vanilla. Line a mould with ice cream, and fill with mixture; cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand three hours.
Cardinal Mousse, with Iced Maderia Sauce Line a mould with Pomegranate Ice; fill with Italian Meringue made of three-fourths cup sugar, one-third cup hot water, whites two eggs, and one and one-half teaspoons granulated gelatine dissolved in two tablespoons boiling water. Beat until cold, and fold in whip from two cups cream; flavor with one teaspoon vanilla, cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand three hours.
Two moulded frozen mousses built on the same plan: a lining of ice cream or water ice, a gelatine-stabilised Italian meringue folded with whipped cream, then three hours packed in salt and ice. The type in the original is garbled in places, so read the quantities with care.
- The chestnut quantity is a misprint"11½ cups prepared French chestnuts" cannot be right for a quart-mould mousse; the intended amount is almost certainly 1½ cups. Treat it as 1½ cups and taste as you fold.
- Prepared French chestnutsMost likely chestnuts cooked in syrup or candied (marrons) rather than raw, though the book does not say. Jarred vacuum-packed chestnuts simmered briefly in light syrup, then broken up, are a reasonable substitute; drain them well or the syrup will loosen the mousse.
- Cook sugar and water five minutesA boiled syrup; the book gives no stage or temperature. Timing alone is unreliable on a modern burner, so use a thermometer (soft-ball, around 238-240F, is the usual mark for an Italian meringue) and pour the syrup onto the whites in a thin stream while beating.
- Egg whitesThe hot syrup is the only heat these whites receive. Pasteurised whites are the sensible choice, particularly since the finished mousse is served to a table without further cooking.
- Granulated gelatineOne teaspoon is a little under half a modern envelope. Sprinkle it over a spoonful of cold water to swell before dissolving it in the boiling water called for; dry granules dropped straight into boiling water leave lumps that show up as rubbery threads.
- Packing in salt and iceA wooden bucket, cracked ice and rock salt in about a 3:1 ratio by volume produced a brine well below freezing. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same work: line the mould, freeze it firm, fill, cover with film and foil, and give it four to six hours rather than three.
- Lining the mouldThe hinge of both recipes. The ice cream or water ice must be soft enough to spread but cold enough to hold a wall, and the mould must go back into the cold until that wall is hard before the mousse goes in. Fill a soft lining and the two layers marble together.
- Unmoulding and yieldUnmoulding -- dip the mould in cool water for a few seconds, wipe, and turn out onto a chilled plate. Both recipes make a large quantity (a quart of ice cream for the lining alone in the first), so use a correspondingly large mould.
- Pomegranate ice and Madeira sauceBoth are cross-references to other pages of the book, not part of this text. Any tart red water ice will stand in for the lining; the iced Madeira sauce is not given here.
Mousse marron belongs to the moment when the American cooking school took over the vocabulary of the French pastry kitchen wholesale: marron is simply chestnut, and candied marrons glac he construction here is the classic bombe: a shell of ice cream or water ice lining the mould, a lighter, unchurned mousse within, so a single turned-out shape gave two textures and two colours when cut. That the recipe assumes a household can pack a mould in salt and ice for three hours says a good deal about the period, when ice was delivered by the cake and an icehouse or well-managed refrigerator was, at least in some households, ordinary equipment rather than a machine. The companion Cardinal Mousse takes its name from the colour, cardinal red being often used in cookery for the deep crimson of pomegranate, currant or raspberry.