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Cherry Parfait
Add one cup of cherry pulp to two cups of thick whipped cream and a quarter of a cup of cherries. Flavor with a few drops of almond extract. Put in a mold, bury in ice and salt for three hours.
Garnish with candied cherries.
A still-frozen parfait in the older sense: no churning, no custard, just sweetened whipped cream frozen solid in a mold. Two things in the original need attention before you start — the missing sugar and the ice-and-salt packing.
- Add sugarThe recipe lists none, and the pulp may well have been sweetened already when it was cooked. Unsweetened cream and fresh cherry pulp will freeze into something bland and icy; count on about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar or a light syrup folded in, tasting the mixture before it goes in the mold since cold mutes sweetness sharply.
- Cherry pulpPitted cherries cooked down and pressed through a sieve, roughly the consistency of thick jam. One cup of pulp takes something like 1 1/2 lb of fresh sweet cherries, or use good cherry preserves thinned slightly and sieved.
- "Thick whipped cream"Heavy cream at around 36% fat, whipped to soft peaks rather than stiff. Overwhipped cream turns grainy and will not fold smoothly into fruit pulp; two cups of liquid cream roughly doubles in volume, and the phrasing leaves it unclear whether two cups is measured before or after whipping.
- Almond extractA few drops means just that; extract is potent and will overwhelm the cherries if overdone. Add it to the pulp, not the cream, so it disperses.
- The ice-and-salt moldPack a tightly closed mold in a pail with crushed ice and rock salt in roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, adding more as it melts and draining off the brine so it never reaches the lid. This brine sits well below 32F, which is what makes freezing without stirring possible.
- Freezer insteadA loaf pan covered with plastic pressed to the surface, set in the coldest part of a home freezer until firm through, will stand in for the ice pack. Because nothing is churned, the texture depends entirely on the air already whipped into the cream, so fold gently and do not stir it while it sets.
- UnmoldingDip the mold briefly in warm water and turn out onto a chilled plate. Serve immediately with the candied cherries; a still-frozen cream with no eggs or stabilizer softens fast.
- YieldSomewhere between three cups and a quart depending on how the cream is measured; four to six modest servings.
Parfait in American cookbooks rarely meant the layered glass of ice cream and syrup that the word later came to describe; it meant a rich frozen cream, often built on whipped cream or a cooked egg base, frozen still in a covered mold rather than churned in a freezer. The distinction mattered because still-freezing required no cranking, only ice and coarse salt. Almond extract with cherries is a very old pairing, resting on the fact that cherry and almond are botanical cousins and their kernels share the same faintly bitter aroma; cooks had been putting a few cherry stones or a drop of almond flavoring into cherry preserves long before commercial extract came in bottles.