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Chocolate Parfait
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate 1/4 cup hot water 1 cup sugar Yolks of 4 eggs 1 pint whipped cream 1 teaspoon vanilla Cook the first three ingredients until thick; pour over the beaten eggs and cook in a double boiler until the mixture coats the spoon. Cool thoroughly; add the whipped cream; flavor and freeze like Café Parfait.
A still-frozen custard parfait in the French sense: no churning, no ice cream maker, just a cooked yolk base lightened with whipped cream and frozen solid in a mold. The whole thing depends on getting the custard cooked and then completely cold before the cream goes in.
- The hinge: cool it thoroughlyWarm custard will deflate the whipped cream and the parfait will freeze dense and icy rather than light. Chill the chocolate custard to refrigerator temperature, not merely to room temperature, before folding anything into it.
- "Coats the spoon"That is nappe, about 170-175F. The custard should leave a clean line when you draw a finger through it on the back of the spoon. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle, and over a double boiler that happens slowly enough to catch.
- Pouring over the eggsThe hot sugar-and-chocolate syrup goes into the beaten yolks in a thin stream with constant beating. Dumped in at once it scrambles them.
- Unsweetened chocolateTwo ounces means two squares of baking chocolate, 100 percent cacao. Modern bar chocolate labeled 70 or 85 percent carries its own sugar and would throw the sweetness off; use true unsweetened.
- The pint of creamRead this as a pint of heavy cream, whipped, which gives roughly a quart of whipped volume. Whip to soft peaks only, since it will stiffen as it freezes and overwhipped cream folds in as lumps.
- Freezing without a machine"Freeze like Cafe Parfait" refers to a still-freezing method not reproduced on this page; period practice was to pack the filled mold in crushed ice and coarse salt, commonly around three parts ice to one part salt, and leave it for several hours. A covered loaf pan or metal mold in a home freezer for five to six hours does the same job; no stirring is needed because the whipped cream supplies the air.
- The stray last line"1 pint sugar 1 pint water" is a plain sugar syrup and belongs to no step given here. It is most likely a fragment belonging to an adjacent recipe on the same page. Ignore it.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a quarter of frozen parfait, six to eight servings. It is very rich; small molds or small glasses suit it better than scoops.
Parfait is simply the French for "perfect," and in French usage it names a specific thing: a still-frozen dessert built on a cooked egg-yolk base enriched with whipped cream, frozen in a tall lidded mold without churning. Because the fat and the beaten-in air keep large ice crystals from forming, it needs no dasher and no constant turning, which made it the practical choice for a household that owned a mold and a bucket of ice but not much else. The reference here to "Cafe Parfait" points to the coffee version, coffee being the classic original flavour, with chocolate, caramel and fruit given as variations on the same method. The looser American sense of parfait, meaning layered ice cream and sauce in a footed glass, borrowed the name later and has little to do with this.