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Mousse Au Chocolat
Place four ounces grated chocolate in a copper basin with a teaspoon vanilla essence, four ounces sugar and two gills water. Continually stir on fire with a wooden spoon until thoroughly dissolved, then remove and let cool off. Beat a half pint thick cream to a stiff froth and gradually add to the chocolate, gently mixing meanwhile. Line a dome-shaped mould with a sheet of white paper; drop preparation into mould, tightly cover. Bury in a tub with broken ice and rock salt and let freeze one and a half hours. Take up, thoroughly wipe, unmould on a cold dish over a folded napkin, pull off the paper and serve.
This is a frozen mousse — a still-frozen dessert, not the soft spooned mousse the name suggests today. A few of the quantities and the freezing method need translating.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of water is one cup. Half a pint of cream is one cup, which will whip up to roughly two cups of froth. The four ounces each of chocolate and sugar are weights, not volumes.
- ChocolateGrated chocolate here means a plain dark eating or cooking chocolate rather than anything sweetened for confectionery. A 60–70% bar, chopped fine, behaves as intended alongside the four ounces of added sugar.
- The hinge: cool the base completelyThe chocolate syrup must be cold — refrigerator-cold, not merely off the heat — before the cream goes in. Warm syrup collapses the whipped cream and you get a dense frozen block instead of an aerated one. Fold in thirds with a spatula and stop the moment it is uniform.
- A copper basinAny heavy-bottomed saucepan does the same job. The point of copper was even, responsive heat so the chocolate would not scorch while being stirred; keep the flame low and stir continuously for the same reason.
- The water is generousA full cup of water to four ounces of chocolate makes a thin syrup, and a mousse frozen without churning will read as icy. Reducing the water to about half a cup, or simmering the syrup down before cooling, gives a smoother frozen texture.
- Freezing without a churnAn ice-and-salt tub is a cold bath, not an ice cream machine; the mould sits still and the mixture sets solid. A modern freezer does the same thing, but slower — allow four to six hours for a filled 1-quart mould rather than the ninety minutes the packed salt and ice would achieve.
- Lining and unmouldingThe sheet of white paper is a release liner; parchment or plastic wrap serves better and conforms to a dome. Cover tightly, since an uncovered surface picks up freezer odours and forms crystals. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn it out.
- ServingAbout four to six portions. The folded napkin under the dessert soaks up meltwater as it goes to the table — worth keeping if you are serving a whole unmoulded dome.
Mousse is simply French for froth or foam, and in the professional kitchen of the late nineteenth century it often referred to a whipped-cream preparation frozen without stirring, as distinct from an ice cream worked in a churn or a bombe built in layers — though the term was used loosely, and unfrozen cream mousses existed alongside the frozen kind. Because nothing agitates the mixture, the air comes entirely from the cream, which is why the recipe insists on beating it stiff and folding gently. The apparatus here — a tub packed with broken ice and rock salt, the salt driving the ice below freezing point — was the standard means of making frozen desserts in hotel and restaurant kitchens before mechanical refrigeration became general, and the ninety-minute figure reflects how efficiently a well-packed salt bath draws heat out of a metal mould.