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Angel Parfait
3/4 cup water Whites 3 eggs 1 pint heavy cream 1 tablespoon vanilla Boil sugar and water until syrup will thread when dropped from tip of spoon. Pour slowly on the beaten whites of eggs, and continue the beating until mixture is cool. Add cream beaten until stiff, and vanilla; then freeze.
Café Parfait 1 cup milk 1/4 cup Mocha coffee Yolks 3 eggs 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 cup sugar 3 cups thin cream Scald milk with coffee, and add one-half the sugar; without straining, use this mixture for making custard, with eggs, salt, and remaining sugar; add one cup cream and let stand thirty minutes; cool, strain through double cheesecloth, add remaining cream, and freeze. Line a mould, fill with Italian Meringue, cover, pack in salt and ice, using two parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, and let stand three hours. ½ cup sugar 1/4 cup water
Two frozen desserts have been run together here by the original page layout: the Angel Parfait proper, whose sugar and water quantities ended up stranded at the bottom, and the Caf", the Angel Parfait is an Italian meringue folded into whipped cream, no churning required.
- Reassembling the ingredient listThe 1½ cup sugar and ¼ cup water at the very end are stranded lines from the page layout; they may be the syrup boiled and poured onto the whites, though the quantity is large for three whites. Note that the Angel Parfait's own directions end at "then freeze," and the instruction about lining a mould and packing it in ice refers to filling it with Italian Meringue, so it may belong to a neighbouring recipe. The café mixture is simply frozen.
- "Until syrup will thread"Thread stage is 230–235F on a thermometer. Pour it onto the whites in a thin stream with the mixer running and keep beating until the bowl is no longer warm, eight to ten minutes; if you stop early the meringue slumps and the parfait freezes grainy.
- Egg whites and heatThe hot syrup partially cooks the whites, but the final temperature is not guaranteed. Anyone cooking for someone immune-compromised or pregnant should use pasteurized whites.
- No ice cream maker needed "Then freeze" here means still-freezing in a mould — there is enough air beaten into the meringue and cream that no churning is wanted. A loaf tin lined with plastic wrap, covered and frozen four to six hours, does what the salt-and-ice pack did in three.
- Salt and iceIf you do use the old method, the two-parts-crushed-ice-to-one-part-rock-salt ratio is as the recipe gives it, and takes the bath well below freezing. Ordinary table salt can be substituted, though the coarse grain of rock salt dissolves more slowly.
- Thin cream, for the café versionThin cream here corresponds to what we now call light cream; half-and-half is the closest current equivalent. Heavy cream in the Angel Parfait means modern whipping cream, around 36 percent fat.
- Mocha coffeeThis is a bean variety, not a chocolate-coffee flavouring. Use ¼ cup coarsely ground medium-roast coffee, scalded in the milk and left unstrained until after the custard is cooked, exactly as written.
- Custard temperatureCook the café custard to 175-180F over hot water and no further; the recipe gives neither time nor temperature, so go by the custard coating the spoon.
- YieldThe Angel Parfait makes upwards of a quart — a pint of cream roughly doubles in volume whipped, before the meringue goes in — and serves six to eight. The tablespoon of vanilla is what the book asks for; frozen mixtures mute flavour.
Parfait is French for "perfect," and in nineteenth-century France the name attached to a coffee-flavoured frozen cream, moulded and unchurned — the café version on this page is the closer to that original. The Angel Parfait is the American adaptation, built on Italian meringue rather than an egg-yolk custard so that the mixture holds enough air to freeze smooth without a crank — a real advantage in a household where freezing meant packing a mould in a tub of ice and rock salt for hours. The "angel" is presumably the same conceit as in angel cake: whites only, nothing yellow, nothing heavy. The layered parfait in a tall glass that Americans now picture is a later use of the word.