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Café Parfait
1/2 cup coffee 1 cup cold water 1/2 cup sugar Yolks of 2 eggs 1 pint thick cream Steep the coffee in the water and simmer until reduced to one half the amount; strain it over the yolks of the eggs, well mixed with the sugar; and cook in a double boiler until thick and smooth. Beat the cream to a stiff froth; add the coffee mixture when cool; pour into a mold or ice-cream can and let stand in ice and salt for three hours. Use equal parts of ice and salt and do not stir or turn the mixture.
This is a still-frozen parfait — a cooked coffee custard folded into whipped cream and frozen without churning. The instruction not to stir is the hinge: the whipped cream is doing the work an ice cream freezer would otherwise do, and agitating it collapses the air and gives you a dense, icy block.
- The coffeeThe 1/2 cup is ground coffee, steeped in 1 cup water and reduced by half to make a concentrated essence. Roughly 1/2 cup of very strong brewed coffee, reduced from 1 cup, gets you to the same place; a double-strength espresso-style brew works.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or whipping cream, 36 percent butterfat or more. Anything lighter will not hold a stiff froth and the parfait will freeze grainy.
- Cooking the custardIn the double boiler, take the yolk mixture to 175-180F, stirring constantly — thick enough to coat a spoon. Straining the hot coffee over the sugared yolks tempers them; add it slowly or the yolks scramble.
- Cool it properlyThe recipe says add the coffee mixture when cool, and it means cold. A warm custard will deflate the whipped cream on contact. Chill it over an ice bath or in the refrigerator first.
- Ice and saltEqual parts crushed ice and rock salt in a packing tub brings the brine well below freezing. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job in about 4 to 6 hours, or overnight.
- Sealing the moldIf you do pack in ice and salt, the mold must be tightly closed and the seam sealed with butter or a strip of paper. Brine seeping in ruins the parfait, and this was the standard precaution in period manuals.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six. Let it soften a few minutes before unmolding and slicing.
Parfait is simply French for "perfect," and in French usage it named a frozen cream of this type — a cooked yolk base lightened with whipped cream and frozen still, in a mold, rather than churned. Coffee was the classic flavor, and the earliest French parfaits are generally described as coffee ones. The American ice cream parlor later took up the name for layered sundaes in tall glasses, which is what most readers now picture, but that appears to be a separate line of descent. The packing instructions suggest a household without mechanical refrigeration: ice bought by the block and crushed, with salt to depress the freezing point of the surrounding brine — the same principle as a hand-cranked freezer, minus the crank.