Home › Honey, Ices and Gelatines › Honey Mousse
Honey Mousse
2 Cups Whipped Cream 1 Cup Honey 4 Eggs Beat the yolks of the eggs and then beat the honey in gradually. Heat slowly until thick, stirring constantly. Remove and cool, and then add the whites of the eggs that have been whipped to a stiff froth. Then add the whipped cream and blend all together. Pack in large quantities of ice and salt, and freeze without stirring.
A still-frozen mousse: no churning, no stirring, no ice cream machine. The structure comes entirely from air beaten into the yolk-honey base, the whites and the cream, so the folding and the freezing matter more than anything else here.
- The hinge: cook the base gentlyBeaten yolks and honey heated too fast will scramble and the mousse turns grainy. Use a double boiler, stir constantly, and take it off at about 170-175F, when it coats a spoon; it must not simmer.
- Cool it completely"Remove and cool" means to room temperature or cooler before the whites and cream go in. Warm custard deflates whipped egg white on contact and melts the cream into soup.
- "2 cups whipped cream"Probably two cups after whipping, which would be about one cup of heavy cream. Read the other way, as two cups of liquid cream measured before beating, you would get roughly double the whipped volume. The wording is genuinely ambiguous; the smaller reading is the more likely one for a mousse of this size.
- Raw egg whitesThe whites are folded in uncooked and never heated. Use pasteurized whites or pasteurized shell eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised. Honey should also never be given to children under one year.
- Ice and salt, or the freezer"Pack in large quantities of ice and salt" describes burying a sealed mold in a bucket of crushed ice layered with rock salt, the pre-refrigeration way to hold a mixture below freezing. A covered loaf pan or metal mold in a modern freezer does the same work; allow 4 to 6 hours, or overnight for a mold.
- Freeze without stirringThis is deliberate. Beating during freezing would knock out the air that the mousse depends on, and the mixture is too rich in fat and sugar to freeze rock hard. Expect a dense, semi-soft texture rather than scoopable ice cream.
- Choose the honeyA cup of honey carries the whole flavor. Clover, orange blossom or acacia stay in the background; buckwheat or chestnut will dominate. Honey also depresses the freezing point more than sugar, so the mousse softens quickly once out of the freezer.
- Yield and servingA quart or rather more, serving six to eight. Unmold onto a chilled plate or serve in glasses, and let it stand only a minute or two before eating.
A mousse in this period meant what the French word says, a foam: a sweetened base lightened with beaten egg white and whipped cream, then frozen still, without the paddle and dasher of a churned ice cream. It was a practical dessert for a household that had ice but no ice cream freezer, since a mold packed in salted ice needed little attention once buried. Honey recipes of this sort were promoted in the early twentieth century when refined sugar was scarce or rationed, with honey and syrups pressed into service as substitutes.