Home › Village Receipts › Maple Parfait
Maple Parfait
One large cup of maple syrup, four eggs, one pint of rich thick cream. Whip the cream and let stand a while to cool and drain; make a custard of the syrup and the yolks of the eggs, and set aside to cool; beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, mix with the cream and the custard. Then pack in ice and salt for two and a half hours.
— Miss Charlotte T. Dubois
A still-frozen parfait of the old school, and one that cannot be recommended as written: the beaten whites go into the mixture raw and the finished dish is never heated at any point.
- The raw whites are the problemThe yolks are cooked into a custard with the syrup, but the whites are whipped and folded in cold, then frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply holds it. A cook wanting a maple parfait today should work from a current recipe built on pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue.
- The custard is likely undercooked tooThe custard may be undercooked too -- The receipt gives no temperature, no time and no description of the finished custard beyond "make a custard." There is nothing here to tell you the yolks ever reached a safe temperature.
- Cream in 1900 was not what you buy nowCream then was not what you buy now -- "Rich thick cream" meant unhomogenised, often unpasteurised cream from a local dairy. Letting it "stand a while to cool and drain" shed the thin milk that separated out — a step that has no purpose with a homogenised carton.
- "Pack in ice and salt"This is a still-frozen dessert, not a churned one. The mixture went into a sealed mould buried in a wooden tub of crushed ice layered with rock salt, which drops the brine well below freezing. Two and a half hours was the time needed to set it solid without stirring.
- "One large cup"Not a standard measure. Cup sizes were not fixed in American kitchens until the standardising drive of the 1890s and after, and "large cup" suggests a generous teacup rather than a strict 8 fluid ounces. Even so, the receipt implies roughly one part syrup to two parts cream.
- Maple syrup gradesDarker, strongly flavoured late-season syrup, nearer what is now sold as Grade A Dark or Very Dark, would carry further in a dish like this than pale early syrup, which tends to disappear against a pint of cream.
Parfait is simply French for "perfect," and in American cookbooks the word came to name a particular thing: a rich frozen dessert set in a mould packed with ice and salt, never churned, so it needed no ice-cream freezer and no cranking. That made it a natural for a village receipt book. Maple was a local sweetener of the northern hardwood country, tapped in late winter and boiled down in sugar houses, and a parfait was one of the more genteel ways to show it off. Community cookbooks of this kind printed receipts under the contributor's name; the attribution to Miss Dubois is part of the point, a small piece of social record as much as a set of instructions.