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Parfait with Chocolate
Put a quarter of a pound of chocolate into a saucepan with a little water, and stir until dissolved. Prepare a custard with a pint of milk, ten eggs, and sugar to taste, mix the chocolate with this, and pass the whole through a silk-sieve, then place the mixture over ice, and work in with it a small quantity of cream and syrup. When smooth, pack it in ice for two hours.
A still-frozen parfait rather than a churned ice cream: the custard is enriched, chilled over ice, then left to set in an ice pack without stirring. Oscar assumes you know how to make a stirred custard, so that is where the attention has to go.
- The hinge: cook the custard properlyTen yolks-worth of egg in a pint of milk will thicken fast and scramble faster. Cook it over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon and reads about 180F, then pull it off the heat at once. Straining through the sieve afterwards is your insurance against small curds.
- Ten eggsEggs of the period were not standardised and were often smaller than a modern large egg, and for a parfait of this type Oscar may well mean yolks rather than whole eggs. Eight to ten modern yolks gives the right body; ten whole eggs will make something closer to a chocolate flan.
- The chocolateA quarter pound is 4 oz. Since sugar is added separately to the custard, the chocolate here is most likely a plain unsweetened block of the kind kept for cooking rather than a sweetened eating chocolate. If you use a modern bittersweet bar, cut the sugar back accordingly.
- A silk sieveA fine-mesh strainer or a tamis does the same job. The point is to catch egg threads and any grit from the chocolate before freezing, when texture is fixed for good.
- Cream and syrup"A small quantity" is vague; for a pint of custard, half a cup to a cup of cream and a few tablespoons of sugar syrup, worked in once the base is thoroughly cold. The recipe does not say the cream is whipped, though whipping it and folding it in gives a lighter set. The cream is what keeps an unchurned mixture from freezing into a solid brick.
- Packing in iceThe original means a mould buried in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, for two hours. A freezer at 0F does the same work, though allow four hours or more; there is no churning, so the mixture is simply left alone.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, serving six to eight. Serve in tall glasses or unmould onto a chilled plate, and let it stand a few minutes so the parfait softens to the spoon.
"Parfait" arrived in American kitchens from French practice, where it meant a frozen still-cream built on an egg-rich custard and beaten cream, set in a tall mould without churning — the sundae-in-a-glass sense of the word came later. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to this book in 1896, was writing for a hotel kitchen with an ice house and a steady supply of block chocolate, both of which explain the casual instruction to pack the mixture in ice for two hours. The reliance on ice and salt rather than machinery is the period's clearest signature: mechanical refrigeration existed in commercial plants but not in the home, and a dessert like this marked a household or restaurant that could command ice on demand."}