Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Strawberry Mousse
Strawberry Mousse
Pick the stems from one pound of freshly-gathered ripe strawberries, pass the fruit through a fine hair-sieve into a preserving-pan, mix with it a few tablespoonfuls of vanilla sugar and set the pan on the fire, stirring constantly until the puree is well mixed. Move the pan from the fire, set it on pounded ice, and stir until the contents are cold. Mix a few tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar with one and one-half pints of cream, flavor with a little essence of vanilla, and whip it well. Mix the cream with the puree. Line a dome-shaped mould with white paper, fill it with the above mixture, place a round of paper on the top, and place the lid on the mould, solder the openings with butter, and pack the mould in pounded ice. When ready to serve, dip the mould in cold water, wipe it, and turn the contents onto a folded napkin laid on a dish.
A still-frozen cream — no churning, no custard, no gelatine. The whipped cream is the only thing standing between you and a block of pink ice, so how you fold and how fast you freeze matter more than anything else here.
- The hinge: keep the air inWhip the cream to soft, floppy peaks only, and fold the cold puree in by hand in two or three additions. Cream whipped too stiff goes grainy and folds badly, and a deflated mixture freezes solid rather than mousse-like.
- Everything must be cold before it meetsThe instruction to set the pan on ice and stir until cold is not optional. Warm puree folded into whipped cream will liquefy it, and the mixture will separate into a frozen fruit layer under a fatty one.
- Vanilla sugarSugar stored with a split vanilla pod for a week or two, or blitzed with one. A few tablespoonfuls is roughly 3-4 tbsp; with a pound of ripe strawberries you want the puree distinctly sweet, since freezing mutes sweetness noticeably.
- Hair sieve and preserving-panA fine nylon or stainless sieve does the same job — the point is to remove the seeds. The preserving-pan was a wide, heavy pan, typically copper; any wide saucepan works, and wide is better because the puree cools faster.
- Cream quantityOne and a half pints is 3 cups of heavy cream in US measure; if you read the book as using imperial pints, closer to 3 1/2 cups. Either gives a generous quantity — the mixture roughly doubles once whipped.
- "Solder the openings with butter"Softened butter smeared along the seam between lid and mould, to keep brine from the ice pack seeping in. A modern metal or plastic mould with a tight lid, or a loaf tin double-wrapped in cling film and foil, needs no butter.
- Freezing without an ice cavePounded ice alone sits at 32F and will not freeze the mousse; period practice was to pack the ice with coarse salt, which drops the pack below freezing, though this recipe does not say so. A domestic freezer will set it in several hours, overnight for a large mould.
- UnmouldingDip in cold — not warm — water for a few seconds, wipe, and invert. The folded napkin was standard service practice, and would also catch meltwater and stop the shape sliding. Serve at once; a still-frozen mousse softens fast.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 portions.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book records the Waldorf's kitchen at a time when hotel pastry work in New York drew heavily on French method and vocabulary. A mousse glacée of this kind — fruit puree folded into sweetened whipped cream and frozen without churning — was the still-frozen counterpart to ice cream, needing no freezer crank, and it belonged to the same family as the bombe and the biscuit glacé served in the middle of a long banquet menu. The dome mould lined with paper, the buttered seam and the packing in pounded ice all describe a kitchen relying on delivered block ice rather than mechanical refrigeration: ice was broken up and, in period practice, salted to bring the pack below freezing. The folded napkin on the serving dish is service-room practice — it caught the drip and kept the moulded shape from sliding on porcelain.