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Maple Mousse
1 Pint Whipping Cream 1/8 Teaspoon Salt 4 Tablespoons Maple Syrup Beat the cream until it is very thick, Then beat in the syrup, and add the salt.
Pour the mixture into a mold, pack it in equal parts of ice and salt, and allow it to stand for 3 hours to freeze.
A still-frozen mousse from the era before home freezers: no eggs, no custard, no churning, just sweetened whipped cream set solid in an ice-and-salt pack. The whole success of it rests on how far you take the cream before the syrup goes in.
- Beat the cream fully, but stop short of butter"Very thick" means stiff peaks — the air is the only thing standing between this and a block of frozen cream. Adding the syrup too early slackens the foam and you will get a dense, icy result.
- Fold, do not beat, the syrupThe recipe says to "beat in" the syrup, but with a stand mixer it is easy to overwork the foam; fold the cold syrup in by hand in two additions so the volume survives.
- Chill the syrupRoom-temperature maple syrup will slacken cold whipped cream, so chill it, along with the bowl and beaters, before you start.
- Four tablespoons is not very sweetThat is about a quarter cup to a pint of cream, and sugar is what keeps a frozen dessert from setting rock-hard. Expect something firm and only faintly sweet; more syrup gives a softer, scoopable texture but takes longer to freeze.
- Grade of syrupModern Grade A dark (formerly Grade B) has far more maple character than the pale table grades and stands up better against the fat in the cream. Avoid pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavouring and will taste thin here.
- The ice-and-salt packEqual parts crushed ice and rock salt by volume, packed around a sealed mold in a bucket or cooler with a drain. The brine must reach the shoulder of the mold, and you top up ice as it melts. Three hours is realistic for a quart mold.
- Freezer insteadA modern freezer at 0F does the same job with no salt. Use a metal loaf pan or covered mold, allow four to six hours, and note that a still-frozen mousse never needs stirring — that is the point of the whipped cream.
- Unmolding and yieldDip the mold briefly in warm water and turn out. A pint of cream whipped makes roughly a quart of mousse — six small servings, which is the right size given how rich it is.
Mousses of this kind belong to the still-freezing tradition: mixtures aerated before freezing and then left undisturbed in an ice-and-salt pack, as opposed to ice creams cranked in a churn. The technique let a household turn out a frozen dessert without a freezer machine, and cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry dozens of them flavoured with coffee, chocolate, ginger or fruit pulp. Maple is the New England and eastern Canadian entry in that list. Its appearance in a cookbook of this sort is telling: three ingredients, no custard to curdle, no eggs to temper, and nothing to watch over, exactly the sort of recipe books offered a new housekeeper who was expected to produce a company dessert without much practice.