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Caramel Mousse
Beat the yolks of nine eggs in a stewpan with a dozen tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, then pour in a pint and a half of milk and stir the mixture over a slow fire till it thickens and is on the boiling point; remove it at once, for if it is allowed to boil the eggs will curdle; pass the cream through a fine hair-sieve into a basin, and stir until it has cooled. Put a half-pound of sugar into a small pan, and stir it over the fire until it has boiled to a dark brown. Stir in one teacupful of water with the caramel, and boil it a few minutes longer. Whip the cooled mixture over ice for about ten minutes, then gradually mix in the caramel and four teacupfuls of whipped cream. Pour the mixture into a dome-shaped mould, put a sheet of paper on the top, and close the lid; then pack it in pounded ice and salt. The mousse should be kept for at least one hour in the ice. Dip the mould in milk-warm water, wipe it, and turn the mousse out onto a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper that has been placed on a dish, garnish with small sponge-cakes decorated with dried cherries, and serve.
A cooked custard base lightened with whipped cream, sweetened with a dark dry caramel and set in a mould packed in ice. The technique is sound; the vocabulary and the freezing method are what need translating.
- The hinge: pull the custard before it boilsThe recipe warns against it explicitly. Nine yolks in three cups of milk thicken fast; take the pan off the heat at 175-180F, when the custard coats a spoon. Straining afterwards through a fine sieve is not optional insurance, it is part of the method.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Use ordinary granulated. A dozen tablespoons is three-quarters of a cup, about 5 oz.
- A teacupfulGenuinely imprecise in this period, generally somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup. Reading it as 6 fl oz gives a workable caramel; for the cream, four teacupfuls is best taken as roughly three cups of cream already whipped, from about a cup and a half of heavy cream.
- Pint and a half of milkThree cups. US pints throughout, this being a New York book.
- The dry caramelHalf a pound of sugar melted alone and taken to dark brown, then slackened with water. The water will erupt violently on contact with sugar at that temperature; add it off the heat, at arm's length, and let the caramel cool a little first. Cool the caramel syrup fully before it meets the custard.
- Hair sieve and stewpanA fine-mesh strainer and any heavy saucepan. Nothing about the equipment requires substitution beyond the names.
- Ice and salt, and your freezerPacking a sealed mould in crushed ice and rock salt drives the temperature well below freezing, which is why an hour sufficed. A domestic freezer at 0F will do the same job but wants four hours or more, and the mousse will set firmer than Oscar's did. The sheet of paper under the lid was presumably there to protect the surface; cling film does the same.
- Turning outA brief dip in lukewarm water, a wipe, then invert. If the mousse has been in a modern freezer overnight, give it fifteen minutes in the refrigerator before serving or the texture will be icy rather than creamy.
- YieldThe original gives none. This makes about two quarts, comfortably ten to twelve servings from a domed mould.
Oscar Tschirky was never formally the chef of the Waldorf, but as maître d'hôtel he was its public face, and the 1896 book that carries his name collects the kitchen's working repertoire alongside a good deal of borrowed French practice. A mousse in this sense is not the chilled chocolate cream of later menus but an iced dessert: a custard and whipped cream folded together and frozen still, without churning, in a sealed mould buried in ice and salt. The distinction from a bombe or a glace was one of handling rather than ingredients, and the salt-and-ice pack was, by most accounts, the usual way hotels froze such things before mechanical refrigeration reached kitchens in earnest. The dome shape, the folded napkin, the ring of small sponge-cakes with dried cherries all belong to the service style of the period, when a dessert was expected to arrive as an object to be looked at before it was cut.