When: June 25
A parfait (French for "perfect") is a frozen dessert in France — a specific type of iced cream made from a base of sugar syrup, eggs, and heavy cream, frozen without churning. In America, it became a layered dessert of ice cream, fruit, whipped cream, and sauce served in a tall glass. Both are good. They are not the same thing.
The parfait is one of the few desserts with a legally regulated definition — and the American version has almost nothing to do with the French original.
The French parfait and the American parfait share a name and almost nothing else. The French version — parfait glacé — dates to the 1890s: egg yolks beaten with hot sugar syrup into a foam (a pâte à bombe), folded with whipped cream, and frozen in a mold without churning. The high fat content and the air incorporated into both the yolk foam and the cream prevent ice crystals from forming, producing a dense, smooth, intensely flavored frozen block. It was a technique — no churn, no ice cream machine — that produced results comparable to churned ice cream through a different mechanism. American ice cream parlors of the late 19th century encountered the French name and the prestige that came with it, and adapted freely. The American parfait became a layered glass of ice cream, fruit sauce, and whipped cream — nothing frozen, nothing requiring a bombe, no technique more demanding than scooping and stacking. The French name gave the American dessert its authority; the French technique was...