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Pistachio Parfait
Prepare a pint of pistachio ice cream. Whisk two gills cream to a stiff froth, add half the quantity to the ice cream, mix well with spatula until well amalgamated, then add tablespoon powdered sugar and a few drops vanilla essence to balance of the cream and whisk one minute. Divide the parfait in six parfait or sherbet glasses, decorate top of each with whipped cream, sprinkle a little finely chopped pistachio on surface, arrange half a candied cherry on top of each and serve.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one: softened pistachio ice cream lightened with whipped cream, glassed and garnished. The whole thing lives or dies on temperature control.
- GillsTwo gills is one cup of cream, which whips to roughly two cups of froth. Half goes into the ice cream, the rest is sweetened and sharpened with vanilla for the piped garnish.
- Working temperatureLet the ice cream soften just enough to fold — 15 to 20 minutes in the refrigerator, not on the counter. If it goes to soup the folded cream collapses and you get a sweet slurry that refreezes grainy.
- Folding, not stirringThe spatula suits gentle handling: cut down through the mixture and turn it over rather than beating it round, to keep the air you whipped into the cream. The original asks only that the two be 'well amalgamated', so the technique is inference rather than instruction.
- Firm the glassesThe recipe says divide and decorate, but filled glasses want 30 to 60 minutes in the freezer before the whipped cream goes on, or the garnish sinks.
- Whipped cream for pipingTake the garnish cream to soft-to-medium peaks only. A tablespoon of powdered sugar to the remaining gill (half a cup) of cream is modest by current taste; modern confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch, which helps hold the shape for a short while, but it will not survive long standing.
- Pistachio ice creamPeriod pistachio ice cream got its colour from the nuts and often a little spinach or leaf green, so it was pale rather than the vivid green of commercial tubs. Any good pistachio ice cream works; an almond-extract-heavy supermarket brand will fight the vanilla.
- Nuts and cherriesChop the pistachios fine and toast them lightly if they are raw — untoasted supermarket nuts are often limp. Candied (glacé) cherries, halved, are what is meant, not maraschino, though maraschino is the usual substitute now.
- YieldSix small parfait or sherbet glasses, as stated. In modern glassware of 6 to 8 ounces expect four servings.
Parfait is simply French for "perfect," and in nineteenth-century French practice it meant a specific thing: a still-frozen dessert built on a whipped egg-and-syrup base, requiring no churning. Over time the word drifted to mean almost any layered or lightened frozen sweet served upright in a tall stemmed glass — which is why this version starts from bought or previously made ice cream and folds cream into it. Pistachios themselves were an expensive import in this period, shipped mainly from the Levant and Sicily, and a pistachio flavour signalled a certain restaurant polish; the candied cherry on top belongs to the same era of hotel garnishing, when every dessert left the kitchen with something bright on it.