Home › The World's Kitchen › Creme Vanille Au Parfait
Creme Vanille Au Parfait
Prepare a pint (only) vanilla ice cream. Place three gills cream in a copper basin, set on ice, sharply whisk to a stiff froth and let rest for fifteen minutes. Take up cream with skimmer and place in a vessel, adding to it an ounce fine sugar, a half teaspoon vanilla essence, and beat up for two minutes. Add half the quantity to vanilla in freezer, mix with spatula until well amalgamated, and divide in six parfait or champagne glasses. Slide a dentilated tube at bottom of a pastry bag, drop in balance whipped cream and with it nicely decorate surface of the six glasses, lay a candied cherry on top of each and serve.
A folded frozen dessert rather than a churned one: softened vanilla ice cream lightened with sweetened whipped cream, piped and served immediately. The whole thing depends on keeping everything cold enough that the mixture never slumps.
- Three gillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1½ cups (about 355 ml) of heavy cream. It will roughly double in volume when whipped.
- The copper basin on iceCopper conducts cold quickly and copper basins were common in professional kitchens; any metal bowl set over an ice bath does the same job. Cream whips faster and holds better when the bowl, the whisk and the cream are all thoroughly chilled.
- Why it rests fifteen minutesThe rest most likely let the watery liquid thrown off by the whipped cream drain to the bottom, so the skimmer could lift off only the stiff froth. With modern heavy cream there is little or no drainage; whip to firm peaks and skip the wait.
- An ounce fine sugarBy weight, about 2 tablespoons of superfine (caster) sugar. In the recipe it goes into the skimmed cream along with the vanilla, and the additional two minutes of beating works it in.
- A pint onlyOne pint of ice cream is lightened with half the whipped cream (roughly 1.5 cups whipped), the other half being reserved for piping.
- Folding, not stirringThe spatula and the phrase "well amalgamated" mean fold until no white streaks remain and stop. Overworking deflates the cream and the mixture will weep in the glass.
- Dentilated tubeA toothed piping tip, what a modern kitchen calls a star tube. Reserve the second half of the whipped cream in the refrigerator while you fill the glasses.
- Yield and serviceSix parfait or champagne glasses, as stated. Chill the glasses first, assemble at the last moment, and serve at once, or hold the filled glasses in the freezer for no more than twenty minutes before the cream begins to set hard.
"Parfait" is simply the French for "perfect," and in nineteenth-century French practice it meant a still-frozen dessert — an egg-and-cream base frozen in a mould without churning, so it needed no beating partway through. By the time this book appeared, American restaurant kitchens had stretched the word to cover anything layered or piped into the tall footed glass that still bears the name, and this version is squarely of that school: it borrows the effect of a moulded parfait while doing the work with bought or previously made ice cream and a bowl of whipped cream. The recipe's habits — the copper basin on ice, the skimmer, the resting of the froth, the dentilated tube — are those of a professional garde-manger writing for cooks who piped by hand and turned out portions in matched glassware, and the collection is generally associated with Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, whose cookery books moved hotel-kitchen technique into domestic print.