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Maple Parfait
Substitute maple syrup for boiled sugar and water in Golden Parfait. Mold, pack in ice and salt four hours, and serve with chopped browned almonds.
This is a one-line variation, so the work is in the parent recipe: Lowney's Golden Parfait is a still-frozen dessert of egg yolks cooked with hot syrup, then folded into whipped cream. Everything below assumes that structure.
- What replaces whatGolden Parfait boils sugar and water to a syrup and beats it into egg yolks. Here maple syrup goes in instead of that syrup; the line does not say so, but it is normally brought to a boil first so it is hot enough to thicken the yolks. Use real maple syrup; pancake syrup is corn syrup with flavoring and will taste flat and thin.
- Cooking the yolksPour the boiling syrup into the beaten yolks in a slow stream while whisking, then set the bowl over simmering water and beat until the mixture thickens and reaches 160F. That both stabilizes the base and settles any question about undercooked egg. Cool it completely before the cream goes in or the cream will deflate.
- Proportions, since the original gives noneProportions, since this line gives none -- A workable base is 4 egg yolks, 3/4 cup maple syrup, and 2 cups heavy cream whipped to soft peaks. Once the cream is whipped and folded in, the mixture runs to appreciably more than a quart, so use a mold of at least 1 1/2 quarts. Serves six to eight.
- No churning requiredA parfait of this period is a still-frozen dessert. The whipped cream supplies the air, so there is no stirring during freezing and no ice cream machine needed. Fold gently and do not overwhip the cream, or the texture turns buttery.
- Mold and pack, or use a freezerPacking in ice and salt means burying the filled mold in a bucket of ice and coarse salt, conventionally around three parts ice to one part salt by volume, for the four hours the recipe specifies, draining the brine as it collects. A loaf pan covered with plastic wrap and foil in a modern freezer does the same job in about six hours; give it longer than four, since still air surrenders heat more slowly than a brine bath in direct contact with the mold.
- Sealing the moldIf you do pack in ice and salt, the seam of the mold must be sealed with a strip of buttered paper or plastic wrap under the lid. Brine seeping in is the classic failure of this method, and it ruins the whole quart.
- The almonds"Chopped browned almonds" means blanched almonds browned until golden and fragrant; the book gives no method or temperature. Toasting in a dry pan, or in a modern oven at about 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, will do it. Chop and cool them, and add them at serving, not to the base, so they stay crisp.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other house cookbooks of the period it leans on the kinds of dessert a well-equipped American kitchen was expected to manage. Parfait, from the French for "perfect," reached the United States in the later nineteenth century as a still-frozen cream dessert set in a mold, distinct from the churned ice creams that shared the chapter; the tall stemmed glass sundae now called a parfait is a later borrowing of the name. Maple syrup was an obvious American substitution for cooked cane sugar syrup here, plentiful in New England and common in regional candies and frozen creams. The four hours in ice and salt places this before the household electric freezer: for a home cook, a mold buried in brine was the usual way to hold a dessert below freezing long enough to serve it at a dinner party.