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Butterscotch Parfait
Put in small saucepan 1 1/4 cups brown sugar 2 tablespoons butter and 1/2 cup water; stir until sugar is melted and boil without stirring to 238 degrees F. or until syrup forms a soft ball when tried in cold water. Pour slowly onto 3 egg yolks well beaten, and beat until cold and thick. (This mixture may be made the day before and kept in a cool place, if desired.) Fold in 3 egg whites beaten stiff 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 1/2 cups heavy cream beaten stiff and 1/2 cup nut meats broken in pieces. Put in paper cases, sprinkle with nuts and place in can of ice cream freezer with waxed paper and cardboard between the layers. Surround can with ice and salt, allowing 2 quarts ice mixed with 1 quart salt, using more ice and salt mixture, if necessary. Leave 4 hours or until frozen. Mixture may be frozen in small baking powder boxes or ice cream molds instead of in the paper cases.
A frozen parfait of the old school: a hot-syrup egg base lightened with whipped cream and still-frozen in an ice-and-salt packing rather than churned. Most of it reads clearly to a modern cook, but one element puts it out of bounds.
- The raw whites are the problemThe yolks at least take some heat from the 238F syrup poured over them, but the three egg whites are beaten stiff and folded in cold, never heated at any point. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it merely suspends it, and the dessert is then eaten without further cooking. If you want a butterscotch parfait, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or an all-cooked base.
- 238F is the soft-ball stageThe cold-water test given is accurate: a drop of syrup gathers into a ball that flattens when lifted out. A candy thermometer removes the guesswork, and brown sugar syrups darken fast past this point, turning bitter rather than butterscotch.
- Paper cases and baking powder boxesThese are the small pleated paper cups sold for individual ices, and the small round containers baking powder was sold in, repurposed as single-serving molds; small ramekins or a loaf tin are the modern equivalents.
- No churning involvedDespite the ice cream freezer, the dasher is never mentioned. The can is used purely as a packing vessel, which is what makes this a still-frozen parfait rather than an ice cream. The whipped cream and beaten whites supply the aeration that churning would otherwise provide.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of mixture, or eight to ten individual cases.
Parfait in American cookery of this era meant something quite different from the layered sundae in a tall glass that the word now suggests in diners. It came from the French parfait, a still-frozen dessert built on a cooked egg-and-syrup base folded with whipped cream, requiring no churn and therefore no dasher, no muscle, and no watching. That made it well suited to dishes that could be set aside hours in advance and produced intact. Butterscotch, brown sugar boiled with butter, is often said to have been a popular American flavor by the turn of the century, and the make-ahead note about preparing the yolk base the day before is a small window onto the logistics of entertaining before mechanical refrigeration, when the ice and salt had to be ordered, hauled and packed by hand.