No. 3473

Coffee or Chocolate Mousse

Mousse au Cafe ou au Chocolat

In former days they mingled milk, sugar and flavoring together, and when the preparation was beaten to a stiff froth it was lifted up with a skimmer, drained on a sieve and glasses were filled with it which were then frozen in ice-packed boxes. Now the process is different. A mousse preparation is simply cream beaten till very light, sweetened properly and flavored with natural flavors, liquors or essences.

With Coffee.—Beat a quart of cream till very light, drain it on a sieve and when thoroughly drained put it into a tin basin and mix in twelve ounces of sugar, a gill of coffee and some vanilla essence. Imbed a high-dome mold in ice, fill it with the preparation, fasten on the cover, imbed it well and freeze. It will take about one hour for each quart. Unmold the mousse on a napkin and surround with small cakes.

With Chocolate.—Dissolve two ounces of cocoa at the oven door, dilute it with two gills of twenty-six degree syrup, strain through a sieve and mix in gradually three beaten egg-whites, six ounces of sugar and a quart of well-whipped, drained cream. Pack a tall-dome mold in salted ice, fill it with the preparation, then freeze. A quart of cream takes about one hour to freeze.

← No. 3472 Mousse a la Siraudin Ices & Ice Creams No. 3474 Fruit Mousses with Pineapple or Other Fruits →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer is describing a still-frozen mousse: no churning, no custard, just sweetened whipped cream set in a sealed mold buried in salted ice. The coffee version is straightforward; the chocolate version carries a problem that cannot be worked around within the text as printed.

Raw egg whites, never heatedThe chocolate mousse folds three beaten egg whites into cold cream and cocoa syrup and then freezes it. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it either; a mold of this size will also sit at serving temperature long enough to matter. Follow a current recipe if you want a frozen chocolate mousse with egg white in it.
A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So a gill of coffee is 1/2 cup of strong brewed coffee, and two gills of syrup is 1 cup.
Twenty-six degree syrupDegrees Baume, measured with a hydrometer, not a temperature. A 26 Baume syrup is a heavy pastry syrup, roughly half sugar by weight, around 1.22 specific gravity. It contributes a substantial part of the sweetening in the chocolate version, which may be part of why that version takes six ounces of sugar where the coffee version takes twelve.
"Dissolve the cocoa at the oven door"A nineteenth-century instruction for gentle ambient warmth from a coal range, not baking. The intent is to soften and smooth the cocoa so it disperses in the syrup without lumping.
Draining the whipped creamNot fussiness. Cream whipped by hand throws off liquid, and any free water in a still-frozen mousse becomes ice crystals. Whip to soft-to-medium peaks, drain off what separates, and fold gently.
Sugar is structuralTwelve ounces per quart of cream reads as very sweet, and it is, but sugar depresses the freezing point and is one of the main things keeping an unchurned mousse from setting up as a brick. Cutting it risks a dessert you cannot get out of the mold or off a spoon.
Freezing without an ice caveA salted-ice pack surrounds the mold and pulls heat from all sides in about an hour per quart, as Ranhofer says. A domestic freezer will do the same job but will take several hours, and the mold should be covered tightly against freezer odors and surface frost.
Unmolding and yieldA quart of cream roughly doubles in volume when whipped, so the filled mold is generous and will serve a dozen. Dip the mold briefly in warm water, turn it onto a chilled plate lined with a napkin, and serve at once with the small cakes Ranhofer specifies.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry is unusual in that he pauses to explain what changed. The older mousse he describes was a frothed milk preparation skimmed off, drained and frozen in packed boxes, closer to earlier frothed preparations of the neige type than to a modern mousse; what replaced it was simply whipped cream, sweetened and flavored and set in a mold. The word means froth or foam. One practical advantage of the dish in a restaurant kitchen was that it needed no freezer, no paddle and little attention: a sealed dome mold buried in salt and ice would set itself while the cooks worked on something else. Salt lowers the melting point of ice and so drives the surrounding brine well below freezing, the same principle used in hand-cranked ice cream makers of the period, but here without agitation, which is why sugar and well-whipped cream are doing the work of keeping the texture light.