Home › Ice-Creams and Ices › Fruit Mousses
Fruit Mousses
Whip and drain one pint of rich cream.
Mix with it one cup of any fruit pulp, drained free of juice and sprinkled well with powdered sugar. Add vanilla, mold and pack for three hours.
A still-frozen dessert: no churning, no custard, no cooking. Everything depends on keeping water out of the cream, which is what the draining instructions are for.
- The hinge: drain everythingBoth the whipped cream and the fruit pulp are drained because free liquid freezes into ice crystals and ruins the texture. Whip the cream to soft-to-medium peaks, let it sit in a fine sieve over a bowl for 15-20 minutes so the thin liquid drains off, and press the fruit pulp in a sieve until it stops weeping.
- "Rich cream"Heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above. Anything labelled light or single cream will not hold air and the mousse will freeze solid rather than soft.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means finely milled granulated sugar, close to today's superfine or caster sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either works here; start with about 3 tablespoons per cup of fruit and adjust to the fruit's sweetness.
- VanillaNo quantity is given. About a teaspoon of extract for a pint of cream is enough to round out the fruit without taking over.
- "Mold and pack for three hours"Packing meant burying the sealed mold in a pail of crushed ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt. In a home freezer, use a chilled loaf pan or metal mold, cover the surface with plastic wrap pressed directly onto the mousse, and allow 4 to 6 hours.
- No churning, and none neededA mousse of this type is frozen still. Do not put it in an ice-cream maker: the whipped cream is already the aeration, and churning will collapse it.
- Fruit choiceStrawberry, raspberry, peach and apricot pulp all behave well. Very wet fruits such as melon or pineapple need firm draining, and raw pineapple contains a protein-digesting enzyme that may affect the cream if it sits before freezing.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, serving four to six. Let it stand at room temperature 5 to 10 minutes before unmolding or scooping, since a still-frozen cream sets harder than churned ice cream.
In the ice-cream chapters of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, "mousse" meant something quite specific: sweetened whipped cream, flavored and frozen without stirring, as distinct from a churned ice-cream and from the egg-yolk-based parfait. The word is simply French for froth or foam, and the technique arrived with the French-trained cookery that dominated fashionable American menus in the 1890s and 1900s. Its appeal in a household manual like Butterick's is practical: a mousse needs no cooked custard and no crank freezer, only a mold and a pail of ice and rock salt, which any kitchen with an icebox already had. The insistence on draining both cream and fruit reflects the real limitation of ice-and-salt freezing, in which stray moisture has ample opportunity to form crystals.