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Golden Parfait
1 cup sugar cup water 6 egg yolks 1 pint cream Cook sugar and water five minutes. Pour slowly on to the beaten egg yolks, add whip from cream, turn into mold and pack in ice and salt, and let stand four hours. Café Parfait Add one fourth cup black coffee to Golden Parfait and freeze as Golden Parfait.
A still-frozen parfait in the older American sense: a cooked-syrup yolk base lightened with whipped cream, frozen without churning. Nothing here needs an ice-cream machine.
- The missing water measureThe line reads "cup water" — a fraction has dropped out in printing. Half a cup to one cup of sugar is the standard proportion for this kind of syrup; with less you risk scorching, with more you simply boil longer.
- What five minutes of boiling meansThe recipe names no stage. Five minutes at a boil will typically bring the syrup somewhere in the thread-to-soft-ball range (roughly 230-240F). Time alone is unreliable across different pans and burners, so judge by a thermometer rather than the clock.
- Pour slowly, and keep beatingThis is the hinge. The hot syrup must go into the yolks in a thin thread with the beater running, or the yolks scramble in streaks that never disappear. A stand mixer or a helper makes it straightforward.
- Bringing the yolks to a safe temperatureHot syrup cooks the yolks only partway. For a dessert served without further heating, set the bowl over simmering water after the syrup goes in and beat until the base reaches 160F, or start with pasteurized yolks. Then beat it cool before the cream goes in.
- "Whip from cream"Older cookbooks whipped cream in a shallow pan and skimmed off the stiff froth as it formed, the thinner cream beneath being re-whipped or set aside. Simply whip the pint to soft peaks and fold it into the fully cooled base; a stiff whip makes the parfait dense rather than light.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerPacking a covered mold in crushed ice with rock salt (about three parts ice to one of salt) is what the original assumes. A loaf pan or terrine, covered with plastic pressed to the surface, in a home freezer for four to six hours gives the same result.
- YieldA generous quart, serving six to eight. Because there is no churning, it freezes hard; let it stand ten minutes before slicing.
- The coffee variationQuarter cup of strong brewed coffee; "black coffee" here means brewed coffee without milk, not instant granules or espresso concentrate. Stir it into the base before the cream goes in. The extra liquid may soften the set slightly.
"Parfait" is simply the French for perfect, borrowed in the nineteenth century for a frozen dessert built on a cooked-syrup yolk base — what a pastry kitchen calls a pâte à bombe — folded with whipped cream. Its virtue in an American household kitchen was mechanical: it needed no crank, no dasher, and no one turning a freezer for half an hour. It could simply be molded, packed in ice and salt in a tub or pail, and forgotten until dinner. Lowney's Cook Book, generally credited to Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston, belongs to the genre of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that surrounded their own product with a full domestic repertoire; the frozen desserts chapter is where the company's cocoa and its readers' cream met.