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Honey Parfait
1/2 Cup Honey 2 Eggs 1 Teaspoon Gelatine 1 Cup Cream, Whipped Soften the gelatine in the cold water, and dissolve in hot water. Beat the yolks of the eggs well and then beat the honey in gradually. Heat slowly with the gelatine until thick. Cool, add the well-beaten whites of the eggs and the whipped cream and freeze.
A frozen honey custard from the era before mechanical refrigeration was universal, and before anyone worried about what was in an uncooked egg white. The method has one step that cannot be repaired without rewriting the recipe.
- The raw whites are the problemThe yolks are cooked into a custard, but the whites are beaten and folded in cold and the mixture is then frozen. Nothing in the process brings them to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing preserves bacteria rather than destroying them. A current recipe using pasteurised whites, or an Italian meringue cooked with hot syrup, should be used instead.
- Freezing hides nothingBecause the dessert is served frozen, there is no visual or textural cue that anything is wrong, and it may be held for days or weeks. That is precisely the situation food-safety guidance for uncooked egg is written to cover.
- The water is missingThe instructions call for softening the gelatine in cold water and dissolving it in hot water, but neither quantity appears in the ingredient list. A teaspoon of granulated gelatine would ordinarily be bloomed in a couple of tablespoons of cold liquid, but the original leaves the amount genuinely unstated.
- "Freeze" means a churn"Freeze" likely means still-freezing -- In books of this period, freezing a parfait often meant packing the mixture in a mould and burying it in a tub of ice and coarse salt, sometimes with no stirring at all. The gelatine and the whipped cream would help keep the texture from setting into a solid block without churning.
- Honey as the whole sweetenerHalf a cup of honey is the only sugar, and honey freezes softer than granulated sugar because of its fructose and water content, which may be part of why the gelatine is here.
- ScaleTwo eggs and a cup of cream yield roughly a pint and a half once whipped and aerated. The original states no yield.
Parfait is the French for "perfect," and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks had largely settled it on a frozen dessert built from a cooked egg-and-sugar base lightened with whipped cream and frozen without churning -- a still-frozen mousse rather than an ice cream. Honey in place of sugar was a thrift and a conceit at once, and was promoted in this period by domestic-science writers who regarded it as more wholesome than refined sugar.