Most of us make supper every night, manage to assemble some kind of lunch everyday and certainly whiz through breakfast without the benefit of a recipe. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches don’t require one. Your average potato salad, hamburger, even a plain plate of spaghetti can be assembled without the helpful advice and guidance of a recipe. Most of my island neighbors who cook for their families every day muddle through without cracking a cookbook or even consulting the back of the box.

It was ever thus. Our settler foremothers knew how to build a chowder or bake a pot of beans without a recipe.

But it is a whole `nother ball game when it comes to dessert. The women who could cook all parts of a whole steer with only experience as their guide needed a written note to remind them of the necessary proportions of their favorite sponge cake. The handwritten recipe notebooks of the 18th and 19th centuries would have you think that folks subsisted entirely on cake and pudding. Which brings us to the mousse.

Today, recipes are ubiquitous, and over the past one hundred and twenty years have become increasingly precise. A list of ingredients used to do the trick. But now food writers are expected to specify the kinds and virtues of the equipment, and list every single ingredient in the order in which it is added to the dish, plus the time it takes to prepare the dish, and describe the finished product’s appearance. Some magazines even go so far as to specify the amount of time spent actively doing something to make the dish, and the total running time. It is excruciating to write such things — and to read them, too.

Writing a recipe can be a tricky thing. Some of you may remember a while back that in this very column a quantity of flour went missing from a gingerbread recipe. Several pans of sticky goo resulted in kitchens along the coast as trusting souls figured that if the recipe called for no flour, then surely none was needed. Other less trusting sorts called, wrote, and emailed asking how much they were supposed to use. Deep suspicion about a flourless gingerbread served them well.

Those of us who are slapdash everyday cooks read through recipes then do what we feel like anyway. Those of us who are not slapdash, on the other hand, agonize over the details.

Take my friend who tried to make the chocolate mousse recipe below. Let’s call her Jane. Jane had this chocolate mousse at my house once and thought it was pretty good. I told her it was really easy, had three ingredients and took minutes to make. Now Jane doesn’t cut a great many culinary didoes in the kitchen, but she can bake haddock and ham and steam green beans with the best of them, and I admire the baked chicken dish she makes for gatherings. Her impossible blueberry pie is very good, and every Christmas Eve she makes a vat of fluffy tapioca pudding per family tradition. She wanted the mousse recipe and I sent it to her.

We are indebted to her candor for the account of mousse-making mishaps she related in a mini-essay she sent me. Some of her problems had to do with the specificity of some of the recipe’s instruction. Jane wrote: “Step one required that I melt the chocolate in a `heavy pan.’ Which pan is that, I wondered. I had large pans, small pans, tall pans, short pans, but they seemed to be of a suspiciously similar weight.” Yes, indeed, Jane has a complete set of very nice Revere ware. I guess I ought to have said, “Melt the chocolate in a pan that won’t let it stick and burn.” But Jane figured it out: “Finally a dim memory of my grandmother’s having used a double boiler whenever she was heating milk or chocolate surfaced, and I pounced on that as a way to go.” Whew. I suppose some people know that they can make a double boiler by setting one small pan into a larger pan of water? Jane’s search for the perfect pan used up, she said, about 45 minutes of prep time.

“The next of the three ingredients quickly turned the total number into four,” she continued. Well, that’s because the eggs had to be separated. Jane learned, as I did, to separate eggs by pouring the egg from one half of the shell to the other, holding the yolk in the shell and letting the white drip into a bowl. I have since decided the speediest way to separate an egg is to dump it into my palm and letting the white run between my fingers. No sharp eggshell edges to lacerate the yolks.

Next, my poor friend found I had asked for a large shallow bowl in which to beat the egg yolks and finish the process. That was worth another spell of rooting around in the cupboards for the right utensil. “It was then time for a coffee break,” she said, “and a short nap would have been even nicer.” She forsook the nap and proceeded to “beating the yolks until they are lemony.” She rightly observed that to some people, egg yolks may never look like lemons, but resolutely remain orange-colored. So this little shorthand way of saying beat the yolks until they are light and lemony yellow backfired, causing another delay in completing the recipe.

You can see that the process of adding the chocolate to the beaten egg yolks was sure to cause some consternation, and thank goodness, beating the egg whites put Jane on familiar ground as she turned to her electric mixer. “The sound was comfortingly familiar, and I relaxed and enjoyed beating the egg whites into peaks so lovely that they took my breath away! My enjoyment ended abruptly when my hand slipped and I hit the mixer’s eject button. Still whirring, the beaters skittered across the counter and onto the floor,” leaving a trail of egg white dots and drips behind. Alas.”

Jane finally managed to fold the ingredients together and distribute the mousse among little dishes to chill it. Somehow, it came out chewy instead of delicately fluffy, “somewhere between cold Brie and Jarlsberg cheese.”

Perhaps if I had been a bird on the windowsill, I could explain why my recipe didn’t work for Jane. A real trouper, she was hoping for a grand dessert to please some of her chocolate loving relatives. Instead, she writes, “Last night, some relatives came to dinner. We had ice cream for dessert.”

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Recipe

Chocolate Mousse

Try to obtain a good quality chocolate so that it will have a high fat content and make a smooth mousse. Use whatever level of sweetness you prefer. I like semi-sweet but a combination of semi-sweet, bittersweet or milk might be more to your liking. If you are a worrywart about uncooked eggs, read no further. I use fresh eggs from my neighbor so I don’t fret about such things.

6 ounces of chocolate

4 eggs, separated

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or heavy pan so it won’t stick or burn. Beat the yolks until they are light yellow. Slowly pour in the hot melted chocolate, and blend until the chocolate and eggs are completely mixed. It will be fairly stiff. Beat the egg whites until they are stiff, and stir about a third of the whites into the chocolate mixture to lighten it some. Then fold the rest of the whites in gently. Distribute among your ramekins and chill them. Makes six servings.

Sandy Oliver cooks and writes on Islesboro.