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Cranberry Bombe
Cook berries as for the Compote, adding a tablespoon of dissolved gelatine, then cool and add a pint of whipped white of egg or omit gelatine and add a pint of whipped cream. Sweeten more heavily and freeze in a bombe or melon mould as for Melon Roll. Or, freeze the berries (cooled) partially, then line the mould with the mixture and fill the centre with the whipped egg or cream.
TO KEEP CRANBERRIES (Uncooked) Cranberries may be dried, or may be bottled, filling up with cold water, then corked and placed in cool dry place. Sometimes a good firkin will answer the same purpose when examined frequently.
Two things in this short entry put it outside modern practice: the raw egg-white version of the bombe, and the uncooked bottling instruction tacked on at the end. The notes below explain the mechanics and the units, but the page should be read rather than followed.
- Raw egg white, never heatedA pint of whipped raw white is folded in and then frozen, so the egg is never brought to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing suspends bacteria; it does not destroy them, and a bombe is held in the mould for hours before serving. For a frozen cranberry dessert built on meringue, use a current recipe with a cooked or pasteurised base.
- The bottling instruction is not a preserving methodBerries packed raw into bottles, topped with cold water and corked is a nineteenth-century cellar practice with no heat process and no measured acid, salt or sugar. Cranberries are very acidic, which is why the trick often worked at all, but "examined frequently" is the whole safety margin, and that is not one. Modern canning guidance gives times and temperatures for a reason.
- A firkinA small wooden cask, nine imperial gallons in the beer trade; the word was also applied to butter and other provision casks. What the recipe is after is a cool, dry storage container rather than a specific volume.
- "A pint of whipped white of egg"The measure appears to be taken after beating, not before. Whites expand several times in volume when whipped, so a pint of foam is only a few whites, the exact number depending on how stiffly they are beaten and on whether the pint is imperial or US — worth knowing when reading the parallel instruction for "a pint of whipped cream," which is likewise the whipped volume, from a much smaller quantity of liquid cream.
- Dissolved gelatineThe phrase is ambiguous: it may mean a tablespoon of gelatine that has been dissolved, or a tablespoon of the dissolved liquid. Either way the gelatine is softened and melted in liquid before it goes into the mixture, not stirred in dry.
- Why it says to sweeten more heavilyCold blunts perceived sweetness, so a mixture that tastes correct at room temperature will read flat once frozen. The same logic applies to the acidity of the cranberries, which is why the compote base is pushed well past ordinary stewing sweetness.
- The mould, and the lined versionA bombe or melon mould is a hinged or lidded metal form packed solid and buried in ice and salt in the original method; a metal bowl or loaf pan in a freezer stands in for the shape but not for the ice-and-salt packing. The lined variant — partly frozen cranberry pressed against the walls, the pale mixture in the centre — is the more interesting reading of the two, and it depends on the outer layer being firm but still spreadable when you line the mould.
A bombe glacée took its name from its shape rather than its contents: the early moulds were spherical, like a cannonball or shell, and the term survived into the era of melon, pyramid and pineapple forms long after the sphere had gone. The construction described here — a shell of one frozen mixture lining the mould, a lighter cream or meringue mixture filling the centre — is the classic restaurant form, and its appearance in a domestic collection suggests how far French ice-work had been absorbed into English-language household cookery. The choice of cranberry is distinctly North American: the berry was gathered wild and later cultivated in the sandy bogs of Massachusetts and New Jersey, and its keeping quality raw, thanks to high acidity and firm skins, is what the appended note on drying, bottling and casks is trying to exploit. Storage hints of this kind were often attached to the end of a recipe, since the two questions — what to make now, and how to hold the rest of the barrel — arrived together with the season.