There has been a chocolate mousse renaissance in the UK in the last year or two. Since lockdown, much has been said about our want for comfort and familiarity and the need for simple pleasures; dishes that are affordable, both to make and to buy, allowing as many people as possible to sit down at a restaurant table and let their worries drift quietly away.
Before mousse, there might be devilled eggs. I have enjoyed these all over the country lately. Eggs aren’t cheap, but they are efficient and economical in other ways – they do not burden chefs too much. Skill is required, but to craft devilled eggs is not to spend hours making consommé or filleting mackerel. Where I live, in London, there are numerous devilled eggs. I had a fine pair at Hill & Szrok in Broadway Market not so long ago. This is a butcher’s shop that turns into a restaurant come evening, and since January has been led by a chef called William Gleave, who is excellent. Then there is Shoreditch newbie Bistro Freddie, wherein eggs are softly boiled and straddled by anchovies and a plucky mayonnaise: divine.
Later, but still before the mousse, comes the bavette steak. It will be taken from a cow allowed to roam – hear those hooves: quality meat – but it is among the cheapest cuts and so is abundant and popular in modern Britain. Bavettes in the UK today are likely to arrive medium-rare and swimming in a bordelaise sauce, a classic jus or a springy peppercorn concoction that clings to the beef like a friendly koala bear. Soon the meat juices slip into it and this is a sauce for crispy French fries to bathe in. Self care, essentially.
And then we arrive at the mousse. Chocolate mousse, nearly always. It is everywhere today, from The Devonshire pub in Soho to any one of Big Mamma’s Italian American-style restaurants, each one flamboyant; delirious places that are much the same as one of Tony Soprano’s exceptionally odd dreams. We’ll come to the UK’s Italian American surge another day.
Mousse might be a pub classic or an Italian staple, but it is French by design. Any one of the country’s star-studded chefs, from Raymond Blanc to Hélène Darroze to Claude Bosi – the latter newly the holder of a pair of two Michelin-star restaurants in London following last week’s Michelin awards – might serve it at any time. They will surprise you with a perfect mousse. This dish, conceived in Paris in the 1930s, is effortless in its beauty: light and airy, sweet but not too much, each spoonful a bouncy reminder that often the best things in life are the simplest.
Mousse translates as “foam” or “froth” in French. It must be silky. And while more often than not it arrives cold, sometimes curled into a quenelle, other times scooped from a sharing bowl, a la Big Mamma, and plopped on to dinner plates with near-reckless abandon, warm varieties have recently started to appear.
We might be entering a warm chocolate mousse era. Cold ones aren’t going anywhere, thankfully, but warm mousse is rarer, and I might predict a resurgence within a resurgence. I mentioned Hill & Szrok before and it is here that I had warm mousse. It was for the first time in years. On top was a dollop of cream. It was pretty much a 10/10 dish.
With warm mousse, the dish becomes silkier still: the bubbles are loose, leading to an altogether different textural experience in the mouth. Technically, it might have been an “espuma”, where the whipping is performed by way of an air cream whipper, but I do not know. A warm mousse is theatrical in its elegance. The kind of dish that is romantic. And so it is important. No wonder we are all clamouring for chocolate mousse today, cold or warm. It cannot save Britain, but it is a dish to be eaten as we flounder.
