Whip a quart of cream until very firm, drain on a sieve and when finished return it to a basin to mix in ten ounces of sugar, and half a gill of either Curacoa, maraschino, noyau, kirsch, aniseed, chartreuse, etc., flavoring but slightly with vanilla. Fill a dome-form mold with this, previously coated with any kind of water ice laid on in stripes.
This is a still-frozen mousse in the nineteenth-century sense: sweetened whipped cream frozen solid in a mold without churning. Nothing about the method has changed, but the units and the freezing arrangements need translating.
The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its ice chapter reflects a French repertoire in which mousse meant something quite different from what the word later came to describe: a frozen cream, beaten full of air and set in a mold without ever being churned in a freezer. Because no paddle broke up the ice crystals, everything depended on the fat and sugar and on the cream being drained firm before it went into the mold. The lining of water ice in stripes belongs to the same tradition as the bombe, where a shell of one preparation encases a richer center and the cut slice becomes part of the display. The list of liqueurs may suggest something of what a well-stocked American restaurant cellar held in the 1890s, though that is inference from the recipe rather than evidence; curacao and maraschino and kirsch appear as staples of the pastry kitchen as much as the bar.