Strawberry Mousse: It's actually ice cream

A short note before we get to the strawberries: Millions of people in the US are losing food benefits. In fact, the Supreme Court just granted Trump's appeal to avoid paying food benefits, thus legally clearing the way for people to starve. 

If you are considering buying groceries to drop off at your local food bank, think about donating money directly to them instead. Food banks often buy food at bulk rates, so your money will feed more people than if you did the shopping yourself. And of course, the people in charge of food banks have a firsthand view of what foods are needed.

Right, on with the mousse...

Today, we are concluding our festival of refrigeration with strawberries and marshmallows! I wanted our last salute to frigidity to be a good one.

Frozen Strawberry Mousse 1 (16-ounce) package frozen strawberries, thawed (save and include the juice that separates out) 16 marshmallows (or 3½ ounces by weight) 8 or 9 drops red food coloring 1 cup cream Blenderize the strawberries. Pour the puree through a strainer into a saucepan, gently shaking the strainer help the fruit go through. (This removes the seeds and gritty pulp.) Place the strawberries over medium-low heat. Add the marshmallows and cook, stirring constantly, until marshmallows are completely dissolved. Add food coloring until it turns a nice shade of pink. Or, strain the strawberries into a microwave-safe bowl. Add the marshmallows and then cook in the microwave until they melt, stopping and stirring every 30 seconds. Let the strawberries cool to room temperature. When the strawberries have cooled, whip the cream in a large bowl. Fold in the strawberries. Transfer to a one-quart container and freeze. Serves 6 to 8. undated "Martha Holmes" recipe handout (probably 1930s-1950s), Peoples Gas Company, Chicago

For those who missed it, our refrigerator went out recently. After a horrible few weeks with nothing but a hastily-bought mini fridge while we replaced various parts in the big one, our food is once again cold. 

We have been celebrating the refrigerator's return with a lot of chilled dishes. Most of them have proven somewhere between underwhelming and terrible. Also, this is a perfect recipe to close our salute to cold food. It calls for frozen strawberries, so you can't even buy the ingredients if your refrigerator is broken.

Undated "Martha Holmes" handout, Peoples Gas Company, Chicago

This comes from my great-grandmother's recipe book. It looks like she cut it out of a handout and threw the rest away. In case you're wondering why the recipe directs us to freeze in a "Gas refrigerator" (their capitalization), this comes from the local gas company in Chicago. I only know this because I recognized "Martha Holmes" from when RetroRuth on Mid-Century made a pork cake out of one of their books. It involved adding chunks of raw pork fat to the batter and slowly rendering them out while baking for 4 hours (four hours!) at 250°. (For our metric friends, that's 144 hectoseconds at roughly 120°C.) 

Fortunately, the hog product for this recipe comes pre-rendered and heavily sweetened. We're using marshmallows instead of sugar.

You can see that the strawberries have melted and refrozen a few times, and now conform to whatever shape the bag had slumped to. I already planned to make this before the fridge tried its damnedest to die on us.  Through all our troubles and petty misery, I refused to throw out the strawberries. That would have felt like giving up. I refused to accept an existence with nothing but a mini-fridge jammed into the corner and a big fridge sitting dead with the doors propped open. I clung to the idea of strawberry mousse as a lot of our grocery money went to the city dump and the fridge sat dead in the kitchen. I told myself that the future will be refrigerated and we will have strawberry mousse. 

Now that the time for strawberries had come, I decided that I did enough brute-force sieving when we made the prune whip. I put the strawberries in the blender instead. But I did pour the resulting fruit through a strainer to remove the seeds. Doesn't that look a lot nicer than if I'd just emptied the blender into the bowl?

And now we get to the marshmallows! I don't know why we're supposed to use marshmallows instead of just adding sugar. But I have a few guesses:

First, marshmallows may have been cheaper at the time. You'll note that this recipe doesn't use fresh fruit, nor do we use anything expensive like vanilla.

Second guess: the gelatin in the marshmallows is somehow involved in making the texture come out right.

My third guess: this recipe might come from World War II food rationing. People were only allowed a tiny dose of sugar per month. However, sugary foods didn't count against your sugar allowance, which led to a lot of creative repurposing of sugary processed foods like fruit preserves and marshmallows.

My fourth guess: the recipe's from Chicago and therefore from the Midwest. I'm not an expert on Midwestern food, but they seem to love cooking with marshmallows. I don't know why marshmallows are such a crucial part of Midwestern food culture, but they are.

I was going to melt this on the stove, but then I decided that the microwave would be better. I wouldn't have to worry about anything burning onto the bottom of the pot or do my rubber-spatula best with a sticky mess. It worked beautifully, but it took a surprisingly long time. I think the stove would have been faster (though not easier).

As the strawberries heated up, they went from a pretty red to a less appealing shade of salmon. It turns out that the red pigment in strawberries is not heat stable. Others have known this for a long time (including the people who tell us to use red food coloring in this recipe), but I was only just finding out.

I tasted a spoonful, and I had no idea strawberries could be so tart. Even the farmer's market strawberries I have purchased have never been like this. Today's strawberries almost made me pucker-- and that's with a lot of marshmallows melted into them. I liked knowing that this would have a lot of flavor even after it froze.

The recipe now tells us to "add food coloring until a nice pink is obtained." I didn't think our strawberries looked half bad, but the food coloring made them look so much prettier.

And now, we were ready to whip the cream and then freeze. As I poured in the strawberries, I briefly marveled that the strawberries were such a beautiful pink. Then I was like "Oh right! I added a lot of artificial dye!"

After mixing everything, we had the prettiest pink fluff I've ever made. The cream tempered the strawberries' sourness, but this was still a lot more tart than I ever thought strawberries could be. I couldn't help wondering: are heirloom strawberries hiding in the frozen aisle? After all, they don't have to worry if the strawberries can withstand the long journey to the store. Or, are today's marshmallows smaller than they used to be? Should I have added a few extra ones to make up for shrinking marshmallows?

My camera seems to personally hate this recipe. But you can take my word for it, this looked really nice.

After freezing, our mousse turned into ice cream. And it was really good strawberry ice cream-- the kind that you can tell is made with actual fruit. I thought that perhaps the marshmallows would add a recognizable flavor, but you couldn't tell we used them instead of sugar. Perhaps the gelatin really did help things more than I expected, though. Unlike the cranberry ice cream, this was wonderfully creamy without beating it twice. Granted, it still didn't have as nice a texture as ice cream made in a churn. But when you don't want to deal with bagged ice and rock salt, it's really good.

As we end our salute to chilling and serving, let's review what we made. Starting with the worst so we can end with the best:

• Fudge gelatin.  This was the only recipe that hit the trash before anyone else knew I made it. I sincerely recommend this recipe you have to bring something to a Christmas gathering. It's a great way to let everyone know you don't want to be there and you only brought something because you're supposed to. 
• The whiskey thing. This was the biggest disappointment. Yes, the chocolate gelatin was worse, but I thought the whiskey thing would be good. And you can't be disappointed unless you thought something was worth the hope.
• Prune whip. At this point, we're going from the bad to the mediocre. This one continues to baffle me. The ingredients almost work, but not if you follow the directions. And it was in my great-grandmother's handwriting instead of cut from a pamphlet. (I don't want to admit what this says about her cooking.) 
• Applesauce-date mallow was an unexpectedly good use of citrus, even if the recipe is a bit underwhelming without wartime food shortages in the background.
• Cranberry ice cream. We're leaving mediocrity behind and getting to the good stuff. This is probably the best "two-ingredient-only" recipe I've ever made. Granted, those recipes tend to be disappointing. But this was good in its own right.
• Today's strawberry ice cream. It's nearly tied with the apricot whip. Speaking of which... 
• Apricot whip.  This one was my favorite. It tasted unexpectedly like fresh fruit. It has just enough gelatin to keep it from deflating without getting too, gelatin-y.
• Honorable mention goes to everyone else's favorite: the canned peaches suspended in red Jello. (Some people just don't have a sense of adventure.) If you really want to make it special, use the syrup from the can instead of water and then call it a salad.