Maple Parfait

This is a still-frozen parfait built on raw egg white, and there is no point in the method at which the eggs are heated. The hazard is the reason for the caution above; the notes below explain the failure and decode the period vocabulary.

• The eggs are never cookedMaple syrup is poured over the beaten whites straight from the jug, the mixture is folded into cream and then frozen. Nothing in the sequence brings the egg white to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it — cold merely holds bacteria in suspension until the dessert is eaten.
• Why the omission matters hereMany parfait bases involve heat: a boiling syrup beaten into eggs, which cooks them as it goes, or a cooked custard. This version skips any such step, so the dish carries the full risk of an uncooked-egg preparation with none of the compensating step. Use a current parfait recipe instead.
• "Mold and pack two hours"Not a freezer instruction. The mixture would have gone into a lidded mould packed in crushed ice and coarse salt for two hours — a still-frozen dessert, not churned.
• Frappé glassesSmall stemmed glasses, roughly the size of a modern sherbet or coupe, used for iced desserts and iced drinks. The word signals a portion of a few spoonfuls rather than a scooped dish.
• Pure maple syrupThe insistence on "pure" reflects a period concern: syrup adulterated or blended with cane sugar and sold as maple was a documented problem around the turn of the century, and some cookbooks specified pure syrup for that reason. Grade and flavour aside, the syrup here is the only sweetener and the only flavouring in the dish.
• YieldA pint of cream whipped stiff, plus three whites and half a cup of syrup, makes a bulky aerated mixture — on the order of three pints before it settles. How many of the small glasses that fills depends on their size.