Every April 3rd National Chocolate Mousse Day recognizes the decadent dessert that gained popularity in France in the 1800s.
Mousse is prepared by beating eggs or cream or both to a frothy, airy consistency and then folding the ingredients together to create a light, creamy delight.
While mousse can be either savory or sweet, for this day we will focus on that all time favorite, chocolate.
The words mousse and chocolate are derived from the French language, so it isn’t difficult to believe France is where to begin. While we have no exact point in time when this might have been, we do know chocolate was introduced to the French around the year 1615, and they fell in love.
Then a century later the French developed a method for making mousse. This was mostly made with savory foods, but it couldn’t have been long before the same method was applied to chocolate.
In the United States, an advertisement in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1887 included classes on how to make chocolate mousse offered by a Miss Parloa. She also offered how to make potato soup, larded grouse, potato timbale and corn muffins.
From dark cholate to milk chocolate, bittersweet or any combination, there is plenty of variety when it comes to chocolate mousse.
From Foodimentary:
Interesting Food Facts about Chocolate Mousse
- The word mousse is French and translates as “froth” or “foam.”
- Cold dessert mousses are often poured into decorative glasses and garnished with fruit, sweet sauces, or whipped cream.
- Savory mousses can be made from fish, shellfish, meat, foie gras, etc.
- There are three key constituents to a mousse: base, binder, and aerator.
- They may be hot or cold and are often squeezed through a piping bag onto some kind of platform to be used as hors d’oeuvres.
Fun Fact:
Savory mousse dishes were an 18th century French achievement. Dessert mousses (generally fruit mousses) began to appear much later, in the second half of the 19th century.
The first written record of chocolate mousse in the United States comes from a Food Exposition held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1892.
Chocolate mousse came into the public eye in the U.S. in the 1930s, about the time as chocolate pudding mixes were introduced.
