I have a mousse recipe that uses a raw meringue. I'm not comfortable with the idea of using raw eggs in a mousse and wanted to know if there was any way to substitute the raw meringue with a cooked one.

 An uncooked meringue is a liquid foam, that you can gently fold into the other liquid ingredients of your mousse. A cooked meringue is a dry foam, that you would have to break up to mix into your mousse. Although the flavor would be good, you would definitely notice the pieces of meringue — like little bits of foam insulation — strewn throughout your mousse.

The straightforward options for you (as noted here and there at Ochef) are as follows:

• Use liquid pasteurized egg whites from the grocery store
• Reconstitute dried egg whites
• Reconstitute meringue powder
• Buy (hard-to-find) pasteurized eggs
• Follow steps to make a safe meringue

There are actually lots of recipes for mousse out there that use both raw whites and raw yolks. Traditionally —a hundred-plus years ago — the yolks were ribboned with a hot sugar syrup because the sugar was too coarse to use without melting it. The use of the syrup has staged a come-back in recent years as it can bring the yolks to a temperature where potentially harmful bacteria are destroyed.

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