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A Dainty Side Dish
A chicken mousse is an excellent dish. Take a quarter of a pound of raw chicken breast, chop it fine, pound it to a paste and rub it through a sieve. It takes some time to do this, but it is not a difficult matter; strained raw meat like this is necessary for many dishes. Add to the mince about five tablespoonfuls of rich cream sauce, a tablespoonful of sherry, salt and pepper and the yolks of four eggs. Mix all these ingredients together and add about two tablespoonfuls of thick cream and finally four eggs beaten to the stiffest froth, with a pinch of salt. Butter little dariole or thimbole moulds and fill them with the mixture. Set them in a pan and pour boiling water around them until it reaches up to two-thirds of their depth. Put a tin cover over them so that they will cook evenly, and let the water boil around them for about twenty minutes. By this time they should be cooked through and firm in the center. Turn them out of the moulds on a hot platter and surround them with a mushroom sauce.
A chicken quenelle mixture baked in a water bath — one of the classic French preparations that turn up in American books of 1900 under vague headings like this one. Two things in the text need reading carefully before you start.
- The eight eggs are almost certainly fourThe recipe calls for "the yolks of four eggs" and then "four eggs beaten to the stiffest froth." Whole eggs will not beat to a stiff froth; the second call is for the four whites left over from the first. Read it as four eggs, separated.
- Pounding and sievingThe long work with mortar and sieve exists to break the muscle fibre completely so the mousse sets smooth. A food processor does the same job in a minute; pulse the cold breast to a paste, then push it through a fine sieve or tamis anyway to catch sinew.
- Rich cream sauceA thick béchamel or velouté reduced until it coats a spoon heavily — about 5 tablespoons, which is roughly a third of a cup. It must be cold before it meets the chicken or the mixture will slacken.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of the dish. Chicken paste, sauce and cream all want to be refrigerator-cold when combined, or the emulsion breaks and the baked mousse weeps liquid. Chill the bowl if the kitchen is warm.
- Do not let the water boilThe recipe says to let the water boil around the moulds; modern practice is a bare simmer at 170-180F. Hard-boiling water curdles the egg and pushes the mousse up like a soufflé, after which it collapses grainy.
- Dariole and timbale moulds"Thimbole" is very likely a misprint for timbale. Both are small metal moulds, generally in the region of 3-5 fl oz; ramekins or a muffin tin work, though a taller mould unmoulds more handsomely. Butter them well and line the base with a disc of parchment.
- DonenessTwenty minutes suits small moulds of about 4 oz. The centre should read 165F and feel firm to a light press; a skewer comes out clean. Larger moulds will need proportionately longer.
- YieldA quarter pound of breast plus cream and eggs fills four to six small moulds — one apiece as a first course, two as a light main dish.
Mousses and mousselines of this kind came into American cookbooks straight from professional French kitchens, where forcemeat pounded in a mortar and lightened with cream was standard work for the garde-manger. The technique is the same one behind quenelles and the classic pike mousse of Lyon; what distinguishes a mousse from a plain forcemeat is the cream and beaten white, which make it rise slightly and eat light. The author's aside — that "strained raw meat like this is necessary for many dishes" — is the giveaway that this was written for a cook expected to master a method rather than follow a single recipe, and it is a reminder of how much hand labour a genteel dinner course took before mechanical grinders and electric mixers were common in home kitchens.