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Other Sweet Dishes: Parfait
BANANA PARFAIT 1 1/4 cups of banana pulp (about 3 bananas) 1/2 cup of candied fruit, cut fine (apricots, pineapple, cherries, etc.) 3/4 cup of sugar Juice of 1/2 lemon 3 tablespoonfuls of Jamaica 1 1/2 cups of double cream rum Cook the pulp, sugar and lemon juice until scalded throughout. Beat the cream till firm. Soak the fruit several hours or overnight in the rum; a heavy sugar syrup may be used in place of the rum. If the alcohol or syrup be not used, the fruit will freeze too hard to be eaten. Fold the mixture together and finish in the usual manner.
A still-frozen dessert, meant to be packed and left alone rather than churned. Two things in the original need untangling before you start: the ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column setting, and "finish in the usual manner" assumes you already know how a parfait is frozen.
- The garbled ingredient listRead it as: 1 1/4 cups banana pulp (about 3 bananas), 1/2 cup candied fruit cut fine, 3/4 cup sugar, juice of 1/2 lemon, 3 tablespoons Jamaica rum, 1 1/2 cups double cream. The words "Jamaica" and "rum" were split across the columns.
- Double creamIn an American book of this vintage this means simply heavy or whipping cream, not the 48% British product. Whip it to soft, firm peaks that still fold; whipped to stiff it will fold in as lumps and the parfait sets grainy.
- The alcohol is not a flavouringThe note about the fruit freezing too hard is the hinge of the recipe. Rum and heavy syrup both depress the freezing point of the candied fruit so it stays chewable; without one of them you get gravel suspended in cream. Soak the fruit the full several hours.
- Scalded, then cold"Cook until scalded throughout" means heat the pulp, sugar and lemon to just below a boil so the sugar dissolves and the banana stops darkening. Chill the mixture thoroughly before it meets the cream, or the cream will slacken as the two are folded together.
- Finishing itFold, pack into a mold or loaf tin, press greaseproof paper against the surface, cover and freeze without stirring for four to six hours. The original would have been packed in a mold and buried in ice and coarse salt; a modern freezer does the same job more slowly and with less risk of leakage.
- ServingLet it stand five to ten minutes before scooping or slicing; a no-churn parfait of this richness freezes harder than ice cream. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water if you have molded it.
"Parfait" in early twentieth-century American cookery generally meant something narrower than the layered sundae in a tall glass that the word now suggests: a frozen cream, sweetened and flavoured, that was packed in a mold and frozen still, without the paddle and dasher of a hand-cranked freezer. Because there was no churning to break up ice crystals, the recipes lean heavily on fat and sugar and, as here, on spirits to keep the texture soft. Bananas were by this date widely available in American cities, shipped in quantity from Central America and the Caribbean, and Jamaica rum was a common grocer's rum for flavouring puddings and sauces.