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Orange Mousse
2 Oranges 1 Cup Honey 1 Teaspoon Powdered Gelatine 2 Cups Thick Cream Peel and cut up the oranges, rejecting the white inner skin. Heat the honey over boiling water. Soak the powdered gelatine in a tablespoon of water. Add the orange and the gelatine to the honey and stir for 5 minutes; then remove it from the fire, and when cold add the cream, whipped stiff, Pack in ice and coarse salt (equal quantities) and let stand 3 to 4 hours. Pineapple or other fruit may be used instead of orange.
This is a still-frozen mousse, not a chilled one: the ice-and-salt packing is the freezing method, and nothing is churned. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- "Thick cream" means heavy creamUse cream at 36% fat or higher; anything labelled whipping cream will hold. Half-and-half or light cream will not whip stiff and the mousse will freeze into a solid block.
- Pack in ice and salt, or use the freezerFilling a bucket with equal parts crushed ice and coarse salt around a covered mould brings the mixture below 0F, which is how households froze desserts before mechanical refrigeration. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job in a covered loaf pan or metal mould; give it 4 hours or more and keep it covered so it does not pick up freezer odours.
- Bloom the gelatine properlyA tablespoon of water for a teaspoon of powder is barely enough. Sprinkle it over the water, let it stand 5 minutes until it swells to a solid mass, then add it to the warm honey and stir until no grains remain. Undissolved gelatine shows up as gritty threads.
- Warm the honey, do not cook it"Over boiling water" means a double boiler. The honey only needs to be fluid enough to take up the gelatine; boiling it darkens the flavour and drives off the floral notes that are the point of a honey mousse.
- Cool completely before foldingThe honey mixture must be at room temperature or cooler, or it will deflate the whipped cream on contact. Fold in thirds with a spatula rather than stirring.
- Deal with the orange juiceCut segments free of membrane and pith, then chop and drain them; loose juice freezes into hard shards and waters down the set. Reserve a spoonful of juice to add for flavour if you like, but no more.
- Yield and servingRoughly a quart and a half once the cream is whipped in, serving six to eight. Let it stand 10 minutes at room temperature before unmoulding or scooping; frozen honey mixtures are stiff straight from the freezer.
- On substitutionsThe note about pineapple needs care: fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatine and will keep the mousse from setting. Canned pineapple has been heat-treated, and cooking fresh pineapple long enough to heat it through deactivates the enzyme.
"Mousse" in American cookbooks of this period often meant a frozen dessert made without a churn: whipped cream lightened a sweetened fruit or flavoured base, and the whole thing was sealed in a mould and buried in ice and salt, so that the air already beaten in stood in for the smoothness that stirring would otherwise give. That distinguished it from ice cream, which was worked in a freezer crank, and from a water ice. Honey rather than sugar as the sweetener places this in a small genre of honey cookery current in the early twentieth century. The appeal is obvious: no custard to curdle, no eggs to temper, and no ice cream freezer required beyond a bucket, a mould, and a bag of coarse salt.