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Cocoa Parfait
4 tablespoons Lowney's Cocoa 1/4 teaspoon salt 4 egg yolks 2 teaspoons vanilla 2 cups cream Boil sugar and water together ten minutes, pour syrup on to cocoa which has been beaten with the egg yolks; cook over hot water until of the consistency of soft custard. Beat until cold; add the cream which has been beaten until stiff, vanilla, and salt. Turn into mold, cover, and pack in equal measures of finely crushed ice and rock salt. Let stand four hours. Remove from mold and garnish with cream, sweetened and flavored, and press through the pastry bag.
The parfait may be served in champagne glasses and garnished with beaten cream and candied cherries. See colored illustration, Plate XI, page 251.
A still-frozen parfait in the original French sense: a cooked yolk base lightened with whipped cream and frozen without churning. Two things need attention before you start, one of them a missing ingredient.
- The sugar and water are not givenThe ingredient list omits both, though the method calls for them. Contemporary parfaits of this type use roughly 1 cup sugar boiled with 1/2 cup water; treat any figure as a reconstruction, not the book's own.
- Cocoa means unsweetenedLowney's was a plain cocoa powder for cooking and drinking, not a sweetened preparation. Use unsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking chocolate or a sweetened mix, or the syrup will push it far too sweet.
- Boil the syrup ten minutesLong enough to thicken it well past a simple sugar solution; the book gives no temperature, and how far it reduces will depend on the pan and on the sugar and water quantities, which are missing. What matters is that the syrup goes on hot, since it is what begins cooking the yolks.
- The custard stageOver hot, not boiling, water, stir until it coats a spoon, around 170-175F on a thermometer. Direct heat or a rolling boil beneath will scramble the yolks.
- Beat until coldThis is the hinge. The base must be whipped down to room temperature or cooler before the cream goes in, or the whipped cream deflates and the parfait freezes dense instead of light.
- Cream"cream" here means cream rich enough to whip stiff, as the method requires. Modern heavy or whipping cream is the practical equivalent; do not substitute light cream or half-and-half.
- Freezing without the ice and saltThe mold packed in equal parts crushed ice and rock salt reaches well below 32F. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job: cover the mold tightly and give it four hours or more. No churning is needed at any point.
- UnmoldingDip the sealed mold briefly in warm water and invert. If serving in glasses instead, spoon the mixture in before freezing rather than after.
- YieldWith two cups of cream whipped plus the custard the finished volume is somewhere around 1 1/2 quarts, though this depends on the reconstructed sugar and water; expect roughly eight servings in champagne glasses.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 under the name of Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and belongs to the long tradition of cookbooks issued to sell a branded ingredient: nearly every chapter finds a use for cocoa or chocolate. The dish itself takes its name from the French parfait, "perfect," generally traced to nineteenth-century French kitchens, where it is said to have described a frozen dessert of cooked egg-yolk custard folded with whipped cream and set in a mold without churning, which is why no freezer crank appears in these instructions. The direction to pack the mold in equal measures of crushed ice and rock salt was ordinary household practice in 1907, when iceboxes chilled but did not freeze, and the recipe is accompanied by a reference to a colored plate.