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Mousse Parfait au Café
Ingredients.
The Yolks of five, and the White of one Egg.
Half an ounce of Castor Sugar.
One gill of good Coffee, or a dessertspoonful of best Coffee Essence.
One gill of whipped Cream.
Whisk the sugar and eggs thoroughly till creamy, then continue to whisk them over hot water till quite warm. Place the mixture on ice till cold, whisking all the time; add the cream.
Pour the mixture into prepared moulds, put on the lids, and set them in crushed ice and salt for about three or four hours.
This is a still-frozen coffee parfait of the pre-refrigerator kind: an egg foam lightened with cream and set in a lidded mould buried in ice and salt. The technique is sound, but the egg treatment is not one a modern kitchen can follow.
- The eggs are never cookedFive yolks and one white are whisked over hot water only "till quite warm" — well below the temperature at which egg proteins are pasteurised, and the mixture is then chilled and frozen rather than heated further. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply holds it. There is no stage in this recipe at which the eggs reach a safe temperature.
- No thermometer, no visual cueA modern sabayon-based parfait is taken to a specific temperature and held there, and the cook watches for the ribbon stage. "Quite warm" gives neither a number nor a texture, so there is no way to work the original safely by following what it says. Use a current recipe for iced coffee parfait if you want to make this dish.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg desserts are a particular hazard for the very young, the elderly, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised — precisely the people a rich, soft, spoonable sweet tends to be offered to.
- A gillHalf a cup, five fluid ounces in British measure. The recipe uses one gill of coffee and one gill of whipped cream — the cream measured after whipping, not before.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar, ground finer than granulated so it dissolves in a cold or barely warm foam. Half an ounce is about a tablespoon, which is very little; the sweetness here is meant to be restrained.
- Coffee essenceA thick sweetened coffee syrup, sold in bottles through the nineteenth century and still available. A dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons.
- Prepared mouldsParfait moulds were tall lidded cylinders of tinned copper or pewter. The recipe does not say what "prepared" involved. The lid matters because the mould is packed in salted ice, and brine seeping in ruins the sweet.
- Ice and saltCrushed ice mixed with coarse salt drops the bath well below freezing point, which is what allows a still-frozen mixture to set solid in three or four hours without churning. The high proportion of whipped cream and aerated egg is what keeps it from freezing into a brick.
The parfait is generally said to have begun in French kitchens as a coffee preparation specifically — a frozen cream flavoured with coffee, moulded in a lidded tin and set in ice and salt — and only later did the word spread to other flavours and, in America, to a layered glass of ice cream and syrup. Its defining feature was that it needed no churning: enough whipped cream and whisked egg were folded in to keep ice crystals from forming, so a household with an ice-box and a sack of coarse salt could produce it without a freezing machine. The coffee itself is a marker of the table it was made for: good coffee, or bottled coffee essence, was an ingredient of the well-supplied late-Victorian and Edwardian kitchen.