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Strawberry Parfait
Whip a quart of thick cream with a small cup of sugar; when stiff mix half a pint of strawberry juice in carefully.
Turn into an ice cream mold, press the lid down securely; pack in salt and ice and freeze for three hours.
A still-frozen parfait: nothing is churned, so all the lightness comes from the whipping and all the smoothness from keeping the mixture cold and undisturbed.
- The hinge: stop whipping earlyThe recipe says "when stiff," but whipping only to soft, just-holding peaks is safer. Cream taken to fully stiff can slacken or curdle when a cup of thin fruit juice is folded in, and the parfait may freeze grainy.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or whipping cream, 36% fat or more. Anything lighter will not hold air against that much juice. A quart is 4 cups and roughly doubles in volume when whipped.
- "A small cup of sugar"Read this as about 3/4 cup. Sugar is doing structural work here as well as sweetening — it lowers the freezing point and keeps the finished parfait scoopable rather than icy-hard.
- Half a pint of strawberry juiceOne cup. Crush ripe berries with a little sugar, let them sit half an hour, then strain and press — about 1 1/2 lb of fruit gives a cup of juice. Have it cold before folding, and fold with a spatula in a few strokes only.
- Salt and ice, in proportionThe old packing is roughly one part rock salt to three or four parts crushed ice, layered around a sealed mold in a bucket. Brine seeping in ruins the dessert, so the seam of the lid was traditionally luted with butter or wrapped in waxed paper.
- Or use the freezerA loaf pan or terrine covered with plastic pressed to the surface, in a home freezer at 0F, needs 4 to 6 hours rather than three, because still air transfers heat to the mold far less efficiently than a salt-and-ice pack. Temper 10 minutes before unmolding.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, serving 8 to 10. It has no egg and no stabilizer, so it is best eaten the day it is made; by day two the texture coarsens.
Parfait is simply the French for "perfect," and in French usage it meant a frozen dessert built on beaten egg yolks and syrup, folded with cream and frozen without churning in a tall mold. The still-freezing method needs no dasher and no crank, only a sealed mold buried in salt and ice. That is why recipes like this one appear in general household books of the period alongside cranked ice creams — a family without an ice-cream freezer could still manage a mold in a bucket. The word later drifted in the United States toward the layered dessert served in a tall glass, which is how most readers now hear it, but here it keeps its older sense of cream frozen solid in a shape.