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Chocolate Mousse
Melt one and one-half squares of chocolate, add onehalf cupful powdered sugar, and as soon as the sugar is melted, add gradually one cupful cream. Stir over the fire until boiling point is reached; then add three-quarters tablespoonful of gelatine dissolved in three tablespoonfuls of boiling water, three-quarters cupful of sugar and very little vanilla. Combine mixtures, strain into a bowl placed in a pan of ice water and stir constantly until mixture begins to thicken. Fold in the whip of one quart of cream. Mould; pack in ice and salt and let stand four hours.
This is a still-frozen dessert, not the chilled aerated mousse the name suggests today. Everything after the gelatine goes in is about keeping air in the cream while the cold sets it.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for 1.5 oz. With a total of 1.25 cups of sugar against it, the result is very sweet by current taste; the sugar is doing structural work in a frozen mixture, but it can be reduced somewhat.
- GelatineThree-quarters of a tablespoon is 2.25 teaspoons, almost exactly one standard envelope of powdered gelatine. Sprinkle it over the three tablespoons of water and let it swell before adding, or it will stay grainy.
- "Combine mixtures"The recipe as printed never separates anything, so the instruction appears to be a holdover, either from a cross-reference to a neighbouring recipe or from a longer original. In practice the second three-quarters cup of sugar and the vanilla are stirred into the hot chocolate cream along with the dissolved gelatine, and that whole mixture is what gets strained and chilled.
- The hinge: chill to the point of thickeningThe base must be stirred over ice until it is visibly syrupy and just beginning to set before the whipped cream goes in. Too warm and the cream deflates into a chocolate soup; too cold and the gelatine sets into lumps that no amount of folding will smooth out.
- "The whip of one quart of cream"In period usage this generally means the stiff foam skimmed off cream as it is beaten, with the unwhipped liquid left behind. Whipped cream roughly doubles in volume, so a quart gives something on the order of two quarts of foam, though the skimming method yields less than that; fold it in in three additions.
- Ice and salt, and the modern equivalentPacking a sealed mould in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt drives the temperature below freezing without churning. A home freezer does the same job, though a mould this size may need longer than four hours, and the texture tends to come out firmer and slightly icier than the salt-packed version.
- UnmouldingDip the mould briefly in warm water and turn it out, then let it stand a few minutes before serving. Straight from the freezer it is too hard to eat pleasantly.
- YieldAround two quarts of finished mousse, enough for eight to ten servings.
Mousse is simply French for foam, and in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s the word generally meant a frozen dessert rather than a chilled one: sweetened whipped cream, sometimes with gelatine, packed in a mould and buried in ice and salt to set without churning. It sat between ice cream, which needed a crank freezer and constant agitation, and a plain jellied cream, and it was popular precisely because it required no machine. The reliance on packaged granulated gelatine marks the period too; before it became a reliable household staple in the late nineteenth century, a cook wanting this texture would have had to boil down calf's foot or use isinglass.