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Silver Parfait
1 cup sugar 1 cup water 3 egg whites 1 pint cream flavoring Boil sugar and water until it threads. Pour on to the beaten whites of eggs, add the whip from cream, flavoring, pack in ice and salt, and let stand four hours. 1 cup sugar ½ cup boiling water
A still-frozen dessert built on an Italian meringue and whipped cream, requiring no churning. The whole thing hinges on the syrup temperature and on folding rather than stirring.
- "Until it threads"Thread stage is 230-234F on a candy thermometer, when a drop pulled between finger and spoon forms a fine strand. Below that the meringue will stay slack and weep in the freezer; much above it and the syrup sets into hard threads on contact with the whites.
- Pouring the syrupBeat the whites to soft peaks first, then add the hot syrup in a thin stream down the side of the bowl while the mixer runs, avoiding the beaters. Whip until the bowl is cool to the touch, several minutes, or the cream will melt when folded in.
- "The whip from cream"An older technique: cream was whipped and the stiff foam skimmed off the top as it formed, leaving the thin liquid behind. Simply whip a pint of heavy cream to soft peaks and fold it in; soft peaks, not stiff, or the mixture turns grainy.
- Egg whitesThe syrup warms the whites but does not reliably bring them to a pasteurizing temperature, and nothing further cooks them. Use pasteurized whites, sold in cartons, if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- Packing in ice and saltThe original means burying a sealed mold in a wooden bucket of crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, for four hours. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job: cover the mold and give it four to six hours, or overnight.
- FlavoringLeft open, as was common. One to two teaspoons of vanilla is the default; two tablespoons of a liqueur, strong coffee extract or a fruit puree also work, though anything watery will make the parfait icy.
- The trailing line"1 cup sugar, ½ cup boiling water" at the end belongs to a neighboring recipe or is an alternative syrup proportion carried over in typesetting. It is not a further step in this one.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, serving six to eight. Unmold onto a chilled plate, or freeze in individual glasses.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer whose cookbooks did double duty as advertising and as genuinely useful household manuals. The American parfait diverged early from the French parfait, which meant a frozen custard of egg yolks and cream; in the United States the name came to cover any still-frozen cream mixture set without churning, which suited kitchens that owned a mold and an ice bucket but not a crank freezer. "Silver" here describes the color, distinguishing the white, egg-white version from the yolk-based parfaits, on the same principle as silver and gold cakes. The instruction to pack in ice and salt reflects a kitchen without mechanical refrigeration: home refrigerators were still a decade or more away from most American kitchens, and ice was delivered by the wagon.