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Maple Parfait
1 cup hot maple syrup 1 pint thick cream Beat eggs slightly, and pour on slowly maple syrup. Cook until mixture thickens, cool, and add cream beaten until stiff. Mould, pack in salt and ice, and let stand three hours.
A still-frozen parfait: a cooked maple custard folded into whipped cream and set without churning. No machine is needed, but the custard step decides whether the result is silky or grainy.
- The egg quantityThe method calls for eggs but the ingredient line gives no number. Comparable parfaits of this proportion often use around four eggs, or four to six yolks, to a cup of syrup and a pint of cream; treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than the book's own.
- Cook it gently"Cook until mixture thickens" is best done over hot, not boiling, water, stirring constantly until the custard coats a spoon. Direct heat risks scrambling the eggs, and once curdled the parfait will freeze grainy.
- Cool it completelyThe custard must be cold before the cream goes in, or the whipped cream deflates and the mixture separates into a dense layer and a foam layer as it freezes.
- "Thick cream"Heavy cream (36 per cent butterfat or above) or whipping cream. A pint is two cups, which will roughly double in volume when whipped.
- Maple syrupUse real syrup, not a table blend. Darker grades (formerly Grade B, now Grade A Dark or Very Dark) carry the maple flavour through the cream and the cold, which mute it considerably.
- Packing in salt and iceThe mould was buried in a mixture of crushed ice and rock salt, which holds below freezing. A covered loaf pan or mould in a home freezer does the same work; allow four to six hours rather than three, since a freezer chills more slowly than a salt-and-ice pack.
- Sealing the mouldIf you do pack in ice and salt, the mould must be closed tightly and the seam sealed with butter or a strip of paper, or brine will seep in and ruin the parfait.
- YieldSomething over a quart, serving six to eight. Because there is no churning, it can freeze firm; let it stand a few minutes before unmoulding and slicing.
Parfait in this sense is the American still-frozen dessert rather than the layered French sundae found in later soda fountains: a cooked egg base, sweetened, lightened with whipped cream, and frozen without stirring so that the air beaten into the cream does the work an ice cream churn would otherwise do. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives a run of them in its frozen-dessert chapter, most built on sugar syrup; the maple version substitutes the syrup outright, an unmistakably New England move. The reliance on a salt-and-ice pack rather than a crank freezer is a reminder that the recipe predates domestic mechanical refrigeration, and that the three hours specified assume a brine bath far colder than a modern freezer compartment.