Cafe Parfait
Celestine Eustis
Take two quarts of sweet fresh cream and put it in a bowl. Pound in a clean cloth one pound of ice and add to the cream. Add a pint and a half of essence of coffee, and sugar to taste.
Take two glass pitchers and pour the mixture from one pitcher into the other until thoroughly mixed. Keep on ice fifteen minutes until ready to serve. This is very suitable for an afternoon tea in summer.
Despite the name, this isn’t a frozen dessert but a cold, frothy iced-coffee cream — a Creole answer to the summer heat.
- “Sweet cream”Simply fresh cream, as opposed to soured — use ordinary heavy or light cream; 2 quarts is 8 cups, so scale down freely.
- “Essence of coffee”A strong coffee concentrate — make it from a small pot of very strong drip coffee, or cold-brew concentrate, cooled. 1½ pints is 3 cups.
- Pounded iceA pound of finely crushed ice both chills and lightly dilutes; crushing it in a clean cloth keeps it tidy.
- The pitcher pourPouring back and forth between two pitchers aerates the mix into a light froth — a blender or milk frother does it faster.
- Not a parfait as we know itThere’s no gelatin and no freezing here; think of it as an iced café frappé to serve in tall glasses.
Parfait is simply French for “perfect,” and in nineteenth-century kitchens it named a frozen cream dessert; American cooks later borrowed the word for the layered ice-cream-and-fruit glass we picture now. This Creole café parfait keeps the French name but stays a drink — iced, sweetened coffee lightened with cream and whipped to a froth, served against the New Orleans heat. It belongs to the same summer table as the city’s cold coffee and its devotion to the drip pot: French in vocabulary, thoroughly Southern in climate.
From page 84 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
