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Fruit Parfait
Cut fine 1 pound marshmallows; add 1 cupful hot pineapple juice and strawberry pulp; stir until melted; make boiled icing, using 2 eggwhites; add marshmallow and teaspoonful vanilla; beat until cold; add whip of 1 pint cream; bury in ice and salt; garnish with pineapple and strawberries.
A still-frozen cream, not a layered glass dessert: the mixture is packed in a mould and set in a salted ice bath without churning. Two quantities are left to the cook's judgement, so read the whole thing before starting.
- The hinge: beat until coldThe marshmallow and meringue base must be beaten down to room temperature or below before the whipped cream goes in. Fold warm and the cream deflates, and the parfait freezes hard and grainy instead of light.
- Boiled icing, unspecifiedThe book assumes you know its boiled-icing formula: a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, about 238-240F, poured in a thin stream onto 2 stiffly beaten egg whites. As a working ratio, 1 cup sugar to 1/3 cup water for two whites. The original gives no sugar quantity here.
- Strawberry pulp, unspecified"Strawberry pulp" means crushed or sieved fresh berries, and no amount is given. About 1/2 to 3/4 cup of thick pulp balances a cup of pineapple juice without making the mixture too wet to freeze smoothly.
- Marshmallows then and nowCommercial marshmallows of the period were generally denser and less aerated than today's bagged ones, though the difference is hard to quantify. A pound of modern miniature marshmallows melts quickly into hot juice and gives a sweeter, softer result; you may want to cut back to about 12 oz if you want the fruit to read.
- Fresh pineapple juiceRaw pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that degrades gelatin and can affect protein-set dairy mixtures. Heat deactivates it, so if you use fresh juice, heat it thoroughly rather than merely warming it; canned juice has already been heat-treated.
- Bury in ice and saltThe period method is to pack the sealed mould in a bucket of crushed ice with coarse salt, roughly 3 parts ice to 1 part rock salt, for 3 to 4 hours. A modern freezer does the same job: press plastic wrap onto the surface and freeze 4 to 6 hours, or churn it in an ice cream maker for a lighter texture.
- ServingNo yield is given; between the whipped pint of cream, the boiled icing and a pound of melted marshmallows the mixture comes to well over a quart, enough for eight or more. Let it stand about 10 minutes before unmoulding, and dress it with the pineapple and berries at the table so they do not weep.
In American cookbooks of the early 1900s a parfait was usually not the layered sundae in a tall glass but a still-frozen cream: a cooked egg-and-syrup base lightened with whipped cream and frozen without stirring. The name is the French parfait, "perfect." This version belongs to the marshmallow vogue that followed the arrival of cheap commercial marshmallows, which turn up through the 1910s and 1920s as a sweetener, thickener and stabiliser in everything from fruit salads to frostings, and the use of pineapple juice alongside strawberries reflects how far canned tropical fruit had spread in the American pantry.