Skip to main content
Dessert

Strawberry Mousse

A chilled dessert made with sugar, cream, egg white, and strawberry juice and pulp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Strawberry Mousse

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mousse

  1. Beat the egg white until stiff, then gradually add the sugar.

  2. Beat the cream slightly, then gradually add the strawberry juice and pulp until firm.

  3. Combine the egg white mixture with the cream mixture.

Chill

  1. Pack the mixture in equal proportions of ice and salt for 4 hours.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + strawberrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + strawberrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Whipped into a stiff foam that gives the mousse its light, airy structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilize the whipped egg white foam.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the mousse a smooth, creamy texture.
Strawberry juice and pulp
Provides the main strawberry flavour and moisture to the mousse.

The step that matters

Packing in ice and salt. Salt lowers the freezing point of the ice, so the ice and salt mixture becomes colder than ice alone. This colder chilling firms the mousse over the 4 hours.

Swap the strawberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Strawberrythe original
  4. Raspberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Strawberry Ice CreamStrawberry Ice Cream122 recipesStrawberry SherbetStrawberry Sherbet48 recipesStrawberry Water IceStrawberry Water Ice24 recipesStrawberry FoamStrawberry Foam7 recipes