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Strawberry Mousse
1 quart thin cream. 1 box strawberries. 1 cup sugar. ¼ box gelatine (scant) or 1¼ tablespoons granulated gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water 3 tablespoons hot water Wash and hull berries, sprinkle with sugar, and let stand one hour; mash, and rub through a fine sieve; add gelatine soaked in cold and dissolved in boiling water. Set in pan of ice-water and stir until it begins to thicken; then fold in whip from cream, put in mould, cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand four hours. Raspberries may be used in place of strawberries.
The text as printed here is a fragment: the gelatine line survived but the quantities of berries, sugar and cream did not. Treat it as a method rather than a full formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe original ingredient list has been lost in transcription — only the gelatine and water remain. Mousses of this type generally ran to something like a quart of berries, sugar to taste and a pint of cream, but proportions varied from book to book; anything more precise would be invention.
- ¼ box gelatineThe printed page gives a scant quarter box or 1¼ tablespoons granulated gelatine, as our text now reads. That equivalence shows a quarter box of the period held rather more than a modern envelope; 1¼ tablespoons is roughly 1½ envelopes, about 11 g, of unflavoured powdered gelatin.
- Soften, then dissolveTwo tablespoons cold water to soften, three tablespoons hot to dissolve; the method line calls the hot water boiling. Do not add the dissolved gelatine to an ice-cold pur e before it disperses.
- "Whip from cream"This is the older technique: cream is whisked and the stiff froth skimmed off onto a sieve as it forms, the thin cream underneath being whipped again. Modern cream whipped to soft peaks does the same job; folding it in at soft peak keeps the mousse light rather than buttery.
- The hinge — thicken before foldingChill the sweetened purée over ice-water and stir only until it just begins to set. Fold too early and the cream and fruit separate in the mould; too late and the gelatin sets in lumps that no folding will smooth.
- Packing in salt and iceA still-frozen mousse, not a churned ice. Packing proportions varied; something in the region of three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt around a covered, sealed mould is typical. A domestic freezer does the same work; the recipe's four hours is a fair minimum, and the mousse will need a few minutes at room temperature before unmoulding.
- BerriesSprinkling with sugar and standing an hour draws out juice and makes sieving easy. Raspberries, as the note says, work equally well; strain out seeds either way, since they are unpleasant in a frozen cream.
In the vocabulary of American cookery around 1900, a mousse was generally defined by how it was frozen rather than what went into it: sweetened flavouring folded into whipped cream, sealed in a mould and packed in salt and ice to set without stirring, as opposed to an ice cream worked in a crank freezer. The gelatine is doing structural work — it holds the froth together while the mixture freezes still — and by this date prepared granulated gelatin had become an ordinary grocery item, in place of the calf's-foot and isinglass jellies that had made such desserts a matter of hours of boiling. Desserts of this kind also depended on the commercial ice trade, which put a reliable supply of block ice and rock salt within reach of urban households.