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Pineapple Mousse
1 tablespoon granulated gelatine 2 tablespoons lemon juice ¼ cup cold water 1 cup pineapple syrup 1 cup sugar 1 quart cream Heat one can pineapple, and drain. To one cup of the syrup, add gelatine soaked in cold water, lemon juice, and sugar. Strain and cool. As mixture thickens, fold in the whip from cream. Mould, pack in salt and ice, and let stand four hours.
A still-frozen mousse in the old sense: no churning, just sweetened fruit syrup lightened with whipped cream and set in a packed mould. A few of its instructions are doing more work than they appear to.
- Heat the pineapple, and mean itHeat the pineapple -- Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatine and will leave a mousse soupy; canned fruit has already been heated in processing, so the enzyme is no longer a problem here. The recipe's heating step mainly loosens the fruit and frees the syrup. If you substitute fresh pineapple or fresh juice, scald it first or it will not set.
- "14 cup"Almost certainly a typographical artifact for 1/4 cup cold water, a usual soaking quantity for a tablespoon of granulated gelatine.
- GelatineOne tablespoon of granulated gelatine is roughly one 1/4-oz envelope, about 7 g. Since the mixture is frozen, the set here is only meant to hold the cream in suspension rather than produce a firm jelly.
- "The whip from cream"The period method: beat cold cream and skim the stiff froth off the top with a skimmer as it forms, returning the unwhipped liquid to be beaten again. Whipping the cream to soft peaks in a mixer is the practical modern substitute, though the froth-skimmed whip is drier and yields less. Use heavy cream, at least 36% fat.
- Fold at the right momentCool the syrup until it is thickened to the consistency of raw egg white before folding in the cream. Too warm and it deflates the whip; too cold and it sets into lumps that will not disperse.
- Salt and iceThe mould goes into a wooden bucket or cooler packed with about three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, sealed so no brine seeps in. A modern freezer will do the same job in a covered metal mould or loaf pan, though a mould this size will likely need longer than four hours.
- YieldA quart of cream whipped plus a cup of syrup makes a large dessert, on the order of two quarts frozen, serving a dozen. Halving it is reasonable for a household.
- ServingUnmould by dipping the tin briefly in warm water. It is best eaten the day it is made, before ice crystals coarsen.
"Mousse" in American cookery of this period meant something specific: a frozen cream dessert set without a crank freezer, distinguished from ice cream (churned) and from sherbet or water ice. The pineapple itself marks the date. Canned pineapple in heavy syrup became cheap and reliably available in the United States in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the fruit coming chiefly from mainland canneries packing Caribbean and Bahamian fruit, and from Singapore, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s use it freely in exactly this way, with the syrup treated as an ingredient in its own right rather than poured off. The lemon juice is there for the same reason it always is in these fruit ices: canned syrup alone tastes flat, and acid sharpens it back into fruit.