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How to make a proper old-school chocolate mousse

I’ve tried chocolate mousse recipes from various chefs with all sorts of ingredients and methods, but none of them ever comes out quite right. Do you have any pointers, or maybe a failsafe recipe?
Katie, Kildare, Ireland

Neil Borthwick, chef at The French House, caused a bit of a stir when he put chocolate mousse on his menu when the Soho institution reopened this time last year: it was the first time many of the capital’s diners had seen this old bistro classic in decades.

Borthwick’s take – an immaculate quenelle of fluffy dark chocolatiness – is more cheffy than the 60s dinner party favourite, but he’s not messed with the idea a whole lot. Like all right-thinking people, he has no time for such gimmickry as incorporating olive oil, berries or, God forbid, basil; Google the latter, and you enter an alarming parallel universe inhabited by 44m culinary crackpots, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. Rather, he’s tweaked the traditional recipe, originally out of an act of kindness. “Mine doesn’t use raw egg yolk,” he explains, “for the simple reason that years ago, when I was working at a Scottish country house hotel, a pregnant customer once moaned that she couldn’t have the mousse, so we came up with one she could eat. The fact that it also does away with health and safety concerns about uncooked egg is just a bonus.”

Related: Jeremy Lee’s alluring chocolate mousse recipe | King of puddings

Borthwick makes Italian meringue – essentially, whipped, soft-peak egg whites into which you whisk 115C sugar syrup to stiff peaks (the hot syrup cooks the whites, so there’s no need for baking) – then folds in melted chocolate and lightly whipped cream, before popping it in the fridge to set. “Always use decent chocolate, though,” he warns. “I use a 72% one from Pump Street, but there are loads out there these days. Cheap brands often have too much cocoa butter, which sets so hard you end up with a chocolate brick. And don’t add it until the whites are very stiff, or you’ll be having chocolate soup for pudding.” (Incidentally, food scientist Harold McGee, in his book Keys To Good Cooking, advises resting the mousse for up to an hour before refrigerating it, so the cocoa fat sets “in crystals that will melt more cleanly and refreshingly in the mouth”.)

Italian meringue is probably a bit much for an easy, midweek pudding, however, so let’s also consider the simplest mousse of all, as proposed by the sainted Elizabeth David, hallowed be her name. Her version, to serve four, is chocolate, egg – and nothing else. “The old and reliable formula [is] four yolks beaten into 4oz [120g] melted bitter chocolate and four whipped whites folded in,” she writes. Her 1960 recipe is so idiot-proof, many chefs still turn to it by default. “Chocolate mousse is one of those ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ dishes,” says Freddy Bird, chef/owner of Bristol’s acclaimed new bistro Little French, but then contradicts himself a bit by admitting that he bastardises David’s recipe, albeit with good reason. “It sets quite firmly, so you have to take it out of the fridge earlier, which doesn’t work in a hot, sweaty restaurant kitchen. We lighten ours by making a sabayon with the egg yolks first, then fold that into the chocolate before adding the whisked whites a little whipped cream, too. The rules at home are very different, though: there, it’s the less faff, the better.”

Even David herself goes off-piste in French Provincial Cooking by adding the juice of an orange, but that’s not as risqué as she perhaps imagined it to be. “As any fan of the chocolate orange knows,” Bird says, “some flavours just go together, don’t they?”

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