No. 3477

Mousse with Macaroons or Chestnuts

Mousse aux Macarons ou Marrons

With Macaroons.—Beat a quart of cream till very light, drain on a sieve and mix into it ten ounces of sugar; coat a high-dome mold with virgin maraschino cream and fill it in three distinct layers, alternating each one with broken macaroons soaked in kirsch; imbed in ice and freeze one hour for each quart; unmold on a napkin and surround with lady bouchees with maraschino.

With Chestnuts.—Whip one quart of cream and drain on a sieve. Prepare half a pound of chestnuts boiled in milk with a little vanilla pounded and pressed through a sieve; dilute with a pint of thirty-degree syrup and half a gill of maraschino; incorporate the whipped cream lightly into this puree; pack a mousse mold in ice, line it with a coating of ice cream made without eggs and flavored with prunelle, and fill it in three separate layers with the preparation, the same as the mousse with macaroons, only using crushed chestnuts soaked in maraschino; freeze the molds; unmold and dress on a napkin; decorate around with cream cakes garnished with apricot marmalade (No. 3675).

← No. 3476 Mousse with Liquors Ices & Ice Creams No. 3478 Parfait with Nougat and with Almonds →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's mousses are still-frozen creams — no churning, no custard base — so nearly everything depends on how much air you get into the cream and how little water you leave in it. Two variations share one method.

Drain the whipped creamWhip to soft, floppy peaks only, then let it sit in a fine sieve over a bowl for a quarter of an hour or so. The liquid that drips out is what would otherwise freeze into ice crystals, so skipping this step tends to give a coarser texture.
Thirty-degree syrupA reading on the Baumé saccharometer, not a temperature. It is a heavy syrup of roughly equal weights sugar and water, boiled until dissolved and cooled — about 2 cups sugar to 1½ cups water. A pint of it is a great deal of sweetening for half a pound of chestnuts, and modern palates may want less.
Gills and quartsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of maraschino is 4 tablespoons. The quart is the US quart, 4 cups of heavy cream, which will whip up to something over 2 quarts of finished mousse.
The liqueursMaraschino here means the dry Dalmatian cherry liqueur (Luxardo and the like), not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Prunelle is a sloe liqueur; framboise or a good kirsch stands in acceptably. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so resist adding more than called for or the centre will never set.
MacaroonsAlmond macaroons — Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a shelf today — not coconut macaroons. Break them coarsely and soak briefly in kirsch; leave them too long and they collapse into paste.
ChestnutsVacuum-packed or jarred peeled chestnuts work perfectly. Simmer them in milk with a split vanilla pod until soft, then press through a sieve or ricer. Unsweetened canned chestnut puree substitutes for the half pound; if the puree you find is sweetened, cut back the syrup.
Freezing without an ice cave"Imbed in ice" means packing the sealed mold in a tub of crushed ice and coarse salt for the stated hour per quart. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same work more slowly: butter or oil the mold, cover it tightly with film and foil, and allow at least 6 hours, or overnight for a large dome.
The liningBoth versions are lined with a thin coat of eggless flavoured ice cream, spread over the chilled mold with the back of a spoon and re-frozen firm before the mousse goes in. Work fast and keep the mold cold between steps.
Unmolding and yieldDip the mold in warm water for a few seconds, dry it, and turn out onto a chilled plate lined with a folded napkin — the napkin absorbs meltwater and keeps the dome from sliding. Either version serves 10 to 12.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire in one volume — hence the numbered entries and the cross-references to other recipes rather than any hand-holding. A mousse in this sense is a frozen cream set in a mold packed with ice and salt, without churning, which distinguishes it from the glaces and parfaits that flank it in the same chapter; the technique long predates mechanical refrigeration and depended on the commercial ice trade that supplied restaurant ice houses through the nineteenth century. Marrons are chestnuts, and their pairing with maraschino and heavy syrup belongs to the same French tradition that produced candied marrons glacés and the piped chestnut desserts that later became Mont Blanc. Maraschino itself came from Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, distilled from marasca cherries; its reputation as a luxury flavouring in American restaurants of this period has nothing to do with the dyed cocktail cherry that inherited the name.