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Coffee Parfait
To make coffee parfait, whip a quart of cream until stiff and beat a cup of black coffee and half a cupful of powdered sugar into the cream. Turn into a mould, fit the top on tightly, bury in ice and salt and freeze for four hours.
This is a still-frozen parfait in the older sense: no eggs, no custard, no churning, just sweetened whipped cream frozen solid in a sealed mould. Everything depends on the coffee going in cold and the cream staying aerated.
- Chill the coffee firstA cup of warm or even room-temperature coffee will deflate stiff cream on contact and you will end up with a dense frozen block. Brew it strong, cool it completely, and fold it in rather than beating hard as the original says.
- QuantitiesA quart of cream is 4 cups of heavy cream, which whips to roughly 2 quarts. "Powdered sugar" in books of this date usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar; either works, and half a cup is on the sweet side, appropriate for something eaten frozen.
- Ice and saltThe mould is buried in a packing of roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, which brings the brine well below 32F. Use a bucket or cooler with a drain, and top up the ice as it melts over the four hours.
- Sealing the mouldSalt brine ruins the parfait if it seeps in. Traditional practice was to butter the seam or bind it with a strip of cloth or paper before packing; foil and tape do the same job.
- A freezer insteadA modern freezer at 0F will set this in four to six hours in a loaf pan or covered mould. Because there is no churning and no eggs, it does not need stirring / the whipped cream supplies the air that keeps it from freezing rock-hard.
- UnmouldingDip the sealed mould briefly in cool water, then invert. Let the parfait stand five to ten minutes before serving; straight from a deep freeze it is too hard to taste properly.
- YieldThe original gives none. Four cups of cream makes about 2 quarts of frozen parfait, enough for ten to twelve small servings.
"Parfait" is French for "perfect," and in nineteenth-century French practice it meant a rich frozen cream set in a tall mould without churning / the American layered sundae in a stemmed glass borrowed the name later. This version is the simplest form of the genre: cream, sugar, flavouring, frozen still. Before mechanical refrigeration a frozen dessert was a display of resources as much as skill; it required a supply of ice, a quantity of rock salt, and someone willing to whip a quart of cream by hand. Coffee is often said to have been a fashionable flavouring for frozen creams and bavarians in the late Victorian period, valued for giving a bitter edge to something otherwise very sweet.