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Mousse with Coffee
Put four ounces of coffee into a small saucepan, pour over a little more than one teacupful of water, and add to this one ounce of sugar, and boil. Mix in slowly the yolks of two eggs, allow the mixture to become cold, strain it, and add two breakfast cupfuls of well-whipped cream. Pour the mixture into a glass, and serve.
A late-nineteenth-century coffee mousse of the simplest kind: a strong sweetened decoction, egg yolks, whipped cream. The wording hides both a food-safety problem and several units that no longer mean anything definite.
- The yolks are never cookedThe yolks are never reliably cooked -- The coffee syrup is boiled and the yolks are then stirred slowly into it; the recipe does not say whether the pan is still on the heat, gives no temperature and no cooking time, and the mixture is simply left to go cold. Nothing in the instruction holds the eggs at a temperature that would pasteurise them, and the finished mousse is served cold with no freezing, no acid and no further heat step. Use a current recipe if you want a coffee mousse.
- No custard stage at allA modern coffee mousse either builds a stirred custard held to temperature, or uses a hot sugar syrup beaten into the yolks in a way that is measured and controlled. Oscar's version does neither, and gives no visual cue such as "until it coats the spoon."
- Four ounces of coffeeAlmost certainly four ounces by weight of ground coffee rather than brewed, since water is poured over it, though the original does not say so. Steeped in barely more than a cup of water that is an extremely concentrated decoction, closer to an essence than to a drink.
- Teacupful and breakfast cupfulThey are not the same vessel. A teacup of the period is usually reckoned at about 5 to 6 fluid ounces; a breakfast cup nearer 8 to 10. Whether the two breakfast cupfuls are measured before or after whipping is not stated, which leaves the quantity of cream genuinely uncertain.
- Strain, and mean itWith that quantity of grounds in the pan, straining is not optional tidiness but the step that removes them. The original does not say what to strain through.
- "Pour the mixture into a glass"Singular in the original, but the quantities make three to four servings in stemmed glasses. This is a soft, spoonable mousse set only by whipped cream, not by gelatine, so it will not unmould.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a large compendium in 1896 that gathered restaurant practice, hotel standards and a good deal of borrowed French repertoire. A mousse in this period generally meant something lightened with whipped cream and served cold in a glass or moulded on ice, distinct from the baked and the gelatine-set desserts. The brevity here is characteristic of the book, which leaves the judgement out and assumes the cook can supply it.