Mousse au Chocolat

Mousse, the French word for foam, names a broad family of preparations whose earliest documented recipes date to the eighteenth century. The earliest known reference to a mousse appears in the 1768 work L'Art de bien faire les glaces d'office by M. Emy, which described desserts of whipped cream shaped in pyramids and flavored with coffee, liqueurs, chocolate, or fruit — then called creme en mousse or creme mousseuse. The chocolate mousse in its modern form, relying on beaten egg whites to lighten melted chocolate, developed from this tradition over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became a brasserie and bistro standard. A recipe for mousse de chocolat credited to the eighteenth-century chef Menon in 1755 predates this; the earliest mousse reference of any kind appears in M. Emy's 1768 work on iced creams.

A spoonful of mousse au chocolat is dense yet airy — the chocolate flavor is deep and slightly bitter, the texture light enough to dissolve on the tongue but rich enough to coat it. Made with dark chocolate of high cocoa content, it is markedly less sweet than its ingredients list suggests; the egg-white foam gives it a cloud-like structure that belies the intensity of the chocolate. Served chilled in a small cup or ramekin, often with a thin film of grated chocolate on top.

Mousse au chocolat is built on mechanical aeration. Dark chocolate is melted and, in the classic version, egg yolks are stirred in for richness; separately, egg whites are whipped to soft peaks, denaturing and trapping the albumin proteins into a stable foam that holds air in tiny bubbles. The whites are folded into the chocolate base gently, to preserve as many bubbles as possible, and the mixture is chilled. As it cools, the cocoa butter in the chocolate sets, locking the foam structure in place; the trapped air remains, giving the mousse its characteristic light-yet-dense texture. The same principle, with whipped cream instead of or in addition to egg whites, underlies creamier modern versions.