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Maple Parfait
Beat four eggs slightly, pour on slowly one cup of hot maple syrup.
Cook in double boiler until very thick, stirring constantly. Strain and cool, then add one pint of cream beaten stiff.
Mold, pack in salt and ice and let stand three hours. - Fannie M. Farmer.
A still-frozen parfait in the older French sense: a cooked egg-and-syrup base lightened with whipped cream and frozen without churning. Nothing here is difficult, but the custard step decides whether the result is silky or scrambled.
- The hinge: temper and hold the custard lowPouring hot syrup onto the eggs in a thin stream while whisking is what keeps them from setting into threads. In the double boiler, keep the water at a bare simmer and stop when the mixture coats a spoon heavily, around 175-180F; straining afterward catches anything that did curdle.
- "Parfait" means no churningA parfait in this sense is still-frozen -- The whipped cream supplies the air, so the mixture is frozen without churning, in a mold. Do not put it in an ice cream machine or you will lose the dense, satiny texture the method exists to produce.
- Salt and ice, and the modern substitutePacking meant burying the sealed mold in a bucket of crushed ice mixed with rock salt, roughly one part salt to three or four of ice, which drops the brine well below freezing. A home freezer at 0F does the same job in a covered loaf pan or metal mold; allow four to six hours rather than three, since it works more slowly.
- Sealing the moldIf you do use the ice-and-salt method, the mold must be watertight or brine will seep in and ruin the parfait. Cooks of the period pressed buttered paper under the lid and sealed the seam with a band of fat or cloth.
- Maple syrupUse real syrup, not pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavoring and will taste flat. A darker grade (roughly the former Grade B, now sold as Grade A Dark Color, Robust Taste) gives the pronounced maple flavor this small quantity needs.
- CreamOne pint is two cups of heavy cream, whipped to firm peaks but not to the grainy stage. Fold it into a base that is genuinely cold, not merely cool, or it will deflate.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart and a half, serving six to eight. Unmold by dipping briefly in warm water; let the slices sit a few minutes before serving so the flavor comes forward.
Fannie Merritt Farmer directed the Boston Cooking School and later her own school on Huntington Avenue, and her name on a recipe in a turn-of-the-century compilation such as this was a mark of authority, much as a chef's byline is now. Parfait in the French kitchen meant a still-frozen cream, not the layered sundae in a tall glass that Americans later attached the word to; the egg-thickened base is essentially a cooked sabayon, and the technique is closer to a frozen mousse than to ice cream. Maple as the sweetener places the dish squarely in New England, where syrup was a regional product rather than a specialty item, and where the ice trade had made packing a mold in salt and ice an ordinary domestic operation long before mechanical refrigeration reached home kitchens.