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Cafe Au Parfait
Prepare and keep in the freezer a pint (only) vanilla ice cream. Place one ounce good ground coffee in a small coffee pot, pour over one gill boiling water and let infuse for twenty minutes, then strain it through a fine cheesecloth into the vanilla ice cream; add at the same time half pint whipped cream, mix well with a spatula and let stand in the tub for fifteen minutes more; then fill up six cafe parfait or sherbet glasses, decorate the top with a little whipped cream, arrange four halved candied cherries on top of each and serve.
A coffee parfait built by folding strong coffee and whipped cream into churned vanilla ice cream, then refreezing briefly. The whole thing succeeds or fails on temperature control.
- The hinge: keep everything coldYou are adding room-temperature liquid to frozen ice cream, so work fast and keep the base hard. Chill the strained coffee over ice before it goes in, and have the bowl, spatula and serving glasses in the freezer beforehand.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. One ounce of ground coffee to 4 oz of water is roughly four times normal brewing strength, which is the point -- a weaker infusion would only water the ice cream down.
- "Let infuse for twenty minutes"Twenty minutes of steeping in the pot will pull out bitter, astringent compounds by modern standards. Four to five minutes in a French press, or an equivalent volume of cooled espresso, gives the same intensity without the harshness.
- "The tub" and "the freezer"Both most likely refer to an ice-cream freezer: a metal canister set in a wooden tub packed with cracked ice and coarse salt. A modern freezer will hold the mixture in the same way; the recipe asks for fifteen minutes, and much longer will set it too hard to spoon into glasses.
- A pint (only)The quantity is fixed against the half pint of whipped cream and the gill of coffee; using more ice cream would dilute the coffee flavour and colour.
- Whipped creamHeavy or whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks and unsweetened -- the ice cream carries all the sugar the dish needs. Fold it in rather than stirring, or you lose the lightness that makes it a parfait.
- YieldSix sherbet or parfait glasses, roughly 4 to 5 oz each. Candied cherries are the period garnish; chocolate-covered coffee beans or shaved chocolate sit just as well on top.
"Parfait" in French usage means a frozen dessert of flavoured cream, and café parfait -- coffee parfait -- was a standard on hotel and restaurant menus on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900, served in the tall footed glasses that are often said to have taken its name. The recipe belongs to a period when a household with an ice-cream freezer and a reliable ice supply could produce restaurant desserts at home, and when coffee-flavoured ices were fashionable enough to appear in general household books. Note that the method assumes you have vanilla ice cream already churned and waiting, treating it as a base ingredient rather than a finished dish; the candied cherries are the mark of the era.