Home › The World's Kitchen › Parfait Au Chocolat
Parfait Au Chocolat
Prepare a pint only of chocolate ice cream. Pour into the freezer two tablespoons best Swiss kirsch, a half pint whipped cream, and mix well with the spatula. Fill up six parfait or sherbet glasses, decorate the tops of the glasses with a little more whipped cream and serve.
A three-ingredient frozen dessert that depends entirely on temperature and on how gently the cream is folded in. Everything here happens in a few minutes.
- "The freezer" is the ice cream canIn this period the freezer meant the metal canister of a hand-crank machine, not a cold cabinet. Work in the chilled canister of a modern machine, or any deep metal bowl straight from the freezer.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of chocolate ice cream. The half pint of whipped cream may be measured either before or after whipping; cream roughly doubles in volume when beaten. The mixture is divided among six parfait or sherbet glasses.
- Soften, do not meltThe ice cream has to be pliable enough to accept the cream without being liquid. Ten to fifteen minutes at room temperature, or freshly churned to soft-serve consistency, is the window. Once it goes soupy the folded-in air is lost and it refreezes grainy.
- "Mix well with the spatula" means fold"Mix well with the spatula" -- most likely a folding motion: cut down through the cream and turn it over rather than stirring. Overworking collapses the whipped cream and you end up with plain chocolate ice cream that tastes faintly of cherry.
- Swiss kirschA clear, unsweetened eau-de-vie distilled from cherries and their stones, dry and slightly bitter -- not the sweet red cherry liqueur sold under similar names. Two tablespoons in a pint also slightly lowers the freezing point, which keeps the parfait soft.
- ServingFill the glasses and serve at once, or return them briefly to the freezer; left long, the alcohol-lightened mixture sets hard and dull. Pipe or spoon the additional whipped cream on top just before it goes to the table.
- Chilled glassesTall, narrow parfait glasses warm quickly in the hand. Chilling them beforehand helps the dessert hold its shape between kitchen and table.
Parfait is simply French for "perfect," and in nineteenth-century French confectionery it named a specific thing: a frozen dessert built on a whipped base rich enough to set without churning, most often flavoured with coffee. The word travelled to American hotel kitchens with the French-trained chefs who staffed them, and by the time this book was compiled it had loosened to mean almost any layered or lightened frozen sweet served in a tall footed glass -- the ancestor of the American soda-fountain parfait. The kirsch is the giveaway that the recipe is being presented as continental, and specifying "best Swiss" was a way of signalling the good stuff to a reader who might otherwise reach for something sweetened.