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Angel Parfait
1 C sugar. 1/4 C water. 1 egg white. 1 pt. whipping cream 2 t vanilla-little salt Boil sugar and water without stirring until it spins a thread. Remove from stove, add slowly to the stiffly beaten eggwhites and continue to beat until thick. Add vanilla and a few grains of salt and combine with cream which has been whipped. Turn into tray and allow to freeze without stirring for at least 1½ hours, though it may stand longer with satisfactory results. Serve with maraschino cherries or fresh berries. • APRICOT MOUSSE 1 C sweetened apricot pulp 1/2 pt. cream Kelvinator.
Vanilla or almond extract to taste Pinch salt 1 t gelatine Prepare apricot pulp by rubbing canned or cooked dried apricots through a sieve. Put gelatine in a very little cold water to dissolve, melting it over hot water-add to fruit. Now add cream whipped and salt, extracts and more sugar, if necessary. Freeze in tray of electric refrigerator for about 2½ hours, stirring occasionally so that it will not get too icy around the edge. The gelatine may be omitted but freezing time will be lengthened.
Mrs. A. L. Johnson. 1 lb. cranberries 1 qt. water
A still-frozen parfait: hot syrup beaten into egg whites, folded into whipped cream, frozen solid without churning. The transcription runs the ingredient list together and drops the sugar, water and egg whites, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the pint of cream, vanilla and salt survive in the list. Standard parfaits of this period use about 1 cup sugar to 1/2 cup water and 3 to 4 egg whites for a pint of cream; the original numbers here are simply not on the page, so treat any figure as a reconstruction.
- "Spins a thread"That is the thread stage, roughly 230-234F on a thermometer, when syrup falls from the spoon in a fine strand. Boiling past about 240F will set the meringue too stiff to fold smoothly into the cream.
- Do not stir the syrupThe instruction is deliberate. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup encourages crystals, and a grainy syrup gives a grainy parfait. Wash any crystals down the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- Egg whitesSyrup at thread stage does not reliably pasteurize the whites, and nothing in this dessert is cooked afterwards. Use pasteurized whites if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- Beat the meringue cold'Continue to beat until thick' is best carried on, in practice, until the bowl is no longer warm. Folding a warm meringue into whipped cream deflates both and the parfait freezes dense.
- The trayA 1930s ice tray with the divider lifted out held something on the order of a quart, though capacities varied by make. Any shallow metal pan or loaf tin does the same job; shallow and metal both help it freeze quickly.
- Freezing timeTwelve hours suits a mechanical refrigerator's freezing compartment, which ran considerably warmer than a modern freezer at 0F; in a modern freezer it will set in appreciably less time. Because the meringue and cream carry so much air, no churning or stirring is needed.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of cream whipped plus the meringue makes appreciably more than a quart. Let it stand a few minutes at room temperature before slicing, and serve with the maraschino cherries or berries as directed.
- What follows on the pageThe text runs straight into Mrs. Johnson's Apricot Mousse and then breaks off at the start of a cranberry recipe. 'Kelvinator' there is a brand name used to mean the electric refrigerator, and its 22 hours looks more like a mis-transcription than a real instruction, given that the same recipe says to stir occasionally.
Parfait is simply French for "perfect," and in nineteenth-century France it meant a frozen coffee cream. The American version is a different animal: an Italian meringue of hot syrup and egg whites folded into whipped cream and frozen still, without a crank freezer. It appears in American cookbooks well before this one -- an "Angel Parfait" of this type is in the Boston Cooking-School book of the 1890s -- and it recurs often in community collections of the 1920s and 1930s. The household electric refrigerator with a small freezing compartment reached ordinary kitchens through the late 1920s and 1930s, and the ice tray made frozen desserts possible for cooks with no ice and salt and no dasher to turn. The whipped cream and meringue hold enough air that the mixture never needs stirring. The Apricot Mousse alongside it names "Kelvinator" as though it were the word for the appliance itself, which suggests how new the machine still felt.