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Maple Parfait (Two eggs beaten separately one)
Two eggs beaten separately, one pint of whipped cream, one teacupful of maple syrup. Cook the yolks and maple syrup until thick, stirring constantly. Strain and cool, add the whipped whites of eggs and cream. Freeze and let it stand for one hour or longer.
The custard half of this parfait is cooked, but the meringue half is not, and that is the problem: the beaten whites go in raw, are folded into cream, and are then frozen rather than heated. Freezing does not kill Salmonella, so the finished dessert is served with uncooked egg white in it.
- Why it failsOnly the yolks are brought to temperature, with the syrup. The whipped whites are added after the base has cooled and never see heat at any point, and the dish is then eaten cold. Any pathogen present on or in the shell egg survives intact.
- Freezing is not a control stepFreezing halts bacterial growth but leaves existing organisms viable, and they resume once the dessert softens on the plate.
- The one-hour stand"Let it stand for one hour or longer" most likely means ripening to firm the texture. The recipe does not say at what temperature it stands.
- If you want maple parfaitUse a current recipe, one that either cooks the whites into a hot syrup meringue or omits them entirely in favour of more whipped cream.
- Reading the measurementsA teacupful in this period was usually smaller than a modern measuring cup, though the figure varied from book to book. Whether "one pint of whipped cream" means a pint measured before or after whipping is not clear from the text. "Beaten separately" simply means yolks and whites in different bowls.
Maple parfait belongs to the American vogue, broadly around the turn of the twentieth century, for frozen desserts built on a cooked egg-and-syrup base lightened with whipped cream -- the French parfait, distinguished from ice cream by needing no churning once it went into the mould. Maple syrup was a domestic product, cheaper in the Northeast and the Great Lakes states than vanilla beans or chocolate. Recipes of this kind lean heavily on cream, sugar and eggs used raw or barely cooked, at a time when the connection between shell eggs and enteric illness was not yet part of ordinary domestic advice.