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Butterscotch Parfait
1 1/4 cups brown sugar 2 tablespoons butter 1/3 cup water 3 egg yolks, beaten 3 egg whites, beaten stiff 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups cream, whipped 3/4 cup nut meats, broken 1 teaspoon vanilla Stir brown sugar, butter and water together over flame until sugar is dissolved, then cook without stirring to soft ball stage, 234 degrees F. Pour slowly on to well beaten egg yolks. Continue beating until cold and thick. Chill well. Add salt to stiffly beaten egg whites, fold in whipped cream, nut meats and vanilla. Combine two mixtures and freeze in tray of electric refrigerator or fill small tightly covered cans and freeze in 3 to 1 mixture of ice and salt for 4 hours. This should serve sixteen. Graham Cracker Ice Cream Delight 30 graham crackers 1 cup broken walnuts 1 cup chopped dates 2 cups diced marshmallows 1 1/2 cups orange or pineapple juice 1/3 cup cream 1/2 cup red cherries Add all ingredients except cream to graham cracker crumbs and pack into a loaf pan. Set in refrigerator over night. Place a quarter-inch slice on dessert plate, and a small ball of any kind of ice cream on top. Cover with whipped cream and serve immediately.
A 1930s frozen parfait built on a hot-syrup egg base, written for the then-novel freezing compartment of the electric refrigerator. One structural element of it does not meet current food-safety practice.
- The egg whites are never cookedThe yolks get some heat from the 234F syrup poured over them, but the three whites are beaten raw, folded into cream and frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it, and the dessert is held cold and eaten cold, so nothing in the process ever brings the whites to a safe temperature. If you want a butterscotch parfait, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg product or a fully cooked base.
- Sixteen servings, held for daysSixteen servings -- The yield compounds the problem: a single batch of raw-white mixture is divided across many servings rather than one small portion.
- "Soft ball stage, 234 degrees F"The number matches the standard soft-ball window of roughly 234-240F. Much below it the syrup will not thicken the yolks; much above it the sugar is likelier to crystallise.
- "Tray of electric refrigerator"This means the shallow metal tray in the freezing compartment of an electric refrigerator, which ran warmer than a modern freezer. The recipe also offers an ice-and-salt packing method as an alternative.
- "3 to 1 mixture of ice and salt"Three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, packed around sealed cans. The salt depresses the melting point of the ice and pulls the contents down well below freezing; four hours was the working estimate for small cans.
- "Nut meats"Simply shelled nuts; the recipe does not specify a variety.