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Maple Mousse
1¼ cups maple sirup
2 tablespoons gelatin
½ cup sugar
¼ cup cold water
5 cups cream
Combine maple sirup, sugar and one cup of cream and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Add the gelatin softened in water and dissolved over heat. Strain, cool in ice-water until the mixture thickens, then add the remainder of the cream, whipped stiff. Place in a mold, pack in ice and salt and let stand for four hours.
A still-frozen mousse: no churning, no custard, just whipped cream held in shape by gelatin and frozen in a sealed mold. The whole thing depends on the base being cold enough before the cream goes in.
- The hinge: cool the base to the right pointThe syrup-gelatin mixture must be chilled until it thickens to the consistency of raw egg white before the whipped cream is folded in. Warm, and the cream melts and separates into layers; fully set, and it breaks into rubbery flecks that never disperse.
- Gelatin quantityTwo tablespoons is roughly two envelopes (about ½ oz) of modern powdered gelatin, which is a firm set for this volume; 1½ envelopes gives a softer, more mousse-like texture.
- Cream"Cream" here means heavy cream at 36 percent butterfat or above. Whipping cream sold at 30 percent will not hold the four cups that are whipped here against the weight of the syrup base.
- SirupA variant spelling of syrup, common in American print of the period, and it means real maple, not the corn-syrup table blends that came later. Grade A dark or the old "Grade B" gives the maple flavor enough presence to survive the dairy and the freezing.
- SugarThe extra ½ cup is not only for sweetness — sugar lowers the freezing point and keeps the mousse scoopable rather than icy-hard. Cutting it will give you a solid block.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerPacking a sealed mold in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt brings the surroundings well below 32F and freezes the mousse without stirring. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job in four to six hours; use a loaf pan with the surface pressed against plastic wrap.
- Seal the moldIf you do pack in ice and salt, the brine will find any gap. Traditional practice was to line the lid seam with a strip of buttered paper or plain fat before burying the mold.
- YieldRoughly two to two and a half quarts finished, serving twelve to sixteen. It is very rich; small portions with something sharp alongside suit it better than a full scoop.
Mousse, from the French for froth or foam, entered American dessert vocabulary in the late nineteenth century as a name for frozen creams set without a churn — distinct from ice-cream, which was worked, and from the water ices and sherbets that filled out the same chapter. The still-freezing method in ice and salt was older than mechanical refrigeration and survived in print long after hand-crank freezers were common, because it required no labor once the mold was buried. Maple flavoring marks the recipe as North American, and it appears throughout period cookbooks in candies, frostings and frozen desserts.