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Maple Mousse (Beat the yolks of six eggs)
Beat the yolks of six eggs light. Pour upon them one cupful of maple syrup made very hot. Put over the fire in a double boiler and cook, stirring all the while, until it thickens. Take from the fire and beat until it cools. Whip half a pint of cream and beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth. Stir very lightly into the custard, turn into a melon-shaped mould, and pack in ice and salt, as for ice cream. It should stand in this for at least four hours.
The failure here is narrow but real: the beaten whites of six eggs go in raw and the mixture is never heated again, only frozen.
- The whites are never cookedOnly the yolks meet heat, in the double boiler. The stiffly beaten whites are folded into a mixture that has already been cooled, then packed in ice for hours. Nothing in the procedure brings them to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, which can be present inside intact shell eggs.
- Freezing is not a kill stepPacking in ice and salt takes the mousse well below freezing, but cold only suspends bacterial growth; it does not destroy the organism, and Salmonella can survive frozen storage. Use a current recipe if you want a maple mousse.
- The cooked base is the sound partHot syrup poured onto yolks, then stirred over water until it thickens, is a textbook stirred custard and the one properly heated element in the dish. It is the uncooked meringue folded in afterwards that puts the finished mousse out of range.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup, measured before whipping — it roughly doubles in the bowl.
- Ice and saltThe mould is buried in a bucket of crushed ice layered with coarse salt, usually about three parts ice to one of salt, which drops the brine well below freezing. Because a mousse is not churned, no dasher or cranking is involved — the four hours is simply setting time.
- Melon mouldA ribbed metal mould with a close-fitting lid, the seam sealed with butter or a strip of paper so brine cannot seep in. The shape mattered because the dessert was turned out whole and sliced at the table.
Mousse is simply the French for froth or foam, and by the 1890s it had become the American cookbook name for a frozen dessert lightened with whipped cream and beaten whites rather than churned in a freezer — an easier proposition for a household with ice but no crank machine. Maple syrup gave the flavour a distinctly North American accent, and turn-of-the-century books use it freely in custards, parfaits and candies. The technique of pouring hot syrup onto yolks and thickening them over water is the standard stirred-custard foundation of the period, and the same base appears under a dozen flavour names in books of these years.