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Chestnut Mousse
With one-half pound of chestnut puree mix about six ounces of sugar flavored with vanilla, beat it well with a spoon until it is quite smooth, and then add three wineglassfuls of sweetened whipped cream. Pour the preparation into a dome-shaped mould previously buried in salted ice, cover the mould, solder its joints with flour and water paste, and keep it in the ice for one hour. When ready to serve, dip the mould in hot water, wipe, and turn the mousse out on a folded napkin.
This is a frozen mousse in the nineteenth-century French manner: no eggs, no cooking, just sweetened purée lightened with cream and set in a mould packed in salt and ice. The whole thing depends on getting air into the cream and then not losing it.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe recipe says "add" the whipped cream, but it must be folded in a third at a time with a spatula. Beaten in with the spoon used for the purée, the cream collapses and you get a dense frozen block rather than a mousse.
- WineglassfulRoughly 2 fl oz in period usage, so three wineglassfuls is about 3/4 cup — measured as whipped cream, not as liquid cream. That means whipping about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of heavy cream and measuring the result.
- Chestnut pureeUse unsweetened chestnut purée, sold in cans or tubes. If you can only find crème de marrons, which is already heavily sweetened, cut the added sugar to an ounce or two and taste as you go — 6 oz of sugar to 8 oz of purée is only balanced when the purée is plain.
- Flavored with vanillaPeriod sugar was scented by burying a split vanilla bean in the sugar jar. A teaspoon of vanilla extract stirred into the purée does the same job.
- Salted iceA freezing bath of roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, packed around the mould in a bucket. A modern freezer replaces it entirely, and the flour-and-water seal — whose main purpose was to keep salty meltwater out of the mould — becomes a sheet of plastic wrap under the lid.
- One hour is a brine timingAn ice-and-salt bath runs well below freezing — around 0F when heavily salted — and sets a small mould fast. In a domestic freezer at 0F, allow four hours, or overnight for a mould larger than a pint.
- UnmouldingDip for a few seconds only, wipe, and invert. The folded napkin was standard service for frozen moulds, and it also absorbs the meltwater that would otherwise pool on the serving dish.
- YieldAbout a pint of finished mixture, which serves four to six as written.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the repertoire of a hotel kitchen that ran on French pastry conventions, and this is a mousse glacée of the type that filled the sweet course of long banquet menus — no custard, no churning, no ice-cream freezer, just cream and flavoring frozen still in a shaped mould. Chestnut appears often in such books, and chestnut confectionery was associated particularly with Lyon and Turin; it gave a rich autumn dessert without fruit out of season. The instruction to solder the mould's joints with flour paste is the mark of the pre-refrigeration kitchen: the mould sat buried in a salt-and-ice bath whose brine would ruin anything it touched, so the seam was luted shut like a pie. Domed and pyramid moulds turn out cleanly and stand up on the plate, and the folded napkin beneath was standard service for anything frozen.