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Bombe Glace
Make a syrup from two cups of water and one cup of sugar, allowing it to boil for twenty minutes. Then add one cup of the red juice from blood oranges, color it darker if necessary with fruit red.
Add two tablespoons of lemon juice and the grated rind of one orange, cool and freeze. Line it into a mold, fill with vanilla ice cream, cover, pack in salt and ice and let it stand two hours. - See Page XXX.
A blood-orange water ice frozen as a shell around vanilla ice cream. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the lining step, which the original describes in five words.
- Lining the moldChill the mold hard, then spread the half-frozen orange ice up the sides in a layer about half an inch thick, working quickly with the back of a cold spoon and returning it to the freezer whenever it slackens. Fill the cavity with softened vanilla ice cream, cover, and freeze solid before unmolding.
- The syrupTwo cups water to one cup sugar boiled twenty minutes will reduce noticeably and thicken; the long boil is the measurement, but how much is left depends on the pan. Watch it toward the end rather than trusting the clock, since a wide pan reduces faster than a narrow one.
- "Fruit red"Evidently a red food coloring of the sort sold for household use at the time. Modern blood oranges vary widely in color from crate to crate, so a few drops of red gel coloring does the same job.
- Blood orangesA cup of juice takes about four to six fruit, depending on size and season. Moro and Tarocco give the darkest juice; paler-fleshed fruit will need help with color.
- Freezing the iceThe mixture is a water ice with no dairy and no egg, so it sets hard and granular if simply put in a tray. Churn it in an ice cream maker, or freeze in a shallow pan and beat it thoroughly two or three times as it sets.
- Salt and iceIf you are packing the mold the old way, use about one part rock salt to four parts crushed ice, and cover the packed mold with newspaper or a towel. The recipe's two hours is right for a quart mold. A domestic freezer does the same work with no packing at all, though it will need longer.
- UnmoldingDip the sealed mold briefly in lukewarm water, or wrap it a moment in a cloth wrung out in hot water, then invert onto a chilled plate. Work quickly so the thin orange shell does not soften.
- YieldA one-quart mold serves six to eight in wedges, which is how a bombe is meant to be cut so that each slice shows both layers.
Bombe glacée takes its name, by tradition at least, from the round bombshell shape of the old spherical molds used for it in nineteenth-century France, and the form became a standard of the French repertoire under chefs like Urbain Dubois and Escoffier, who catalogued dozens of named combinations of outer shell and inner filling. The construction typically follows one pattern: a firmer ice lining the mold, a richer cream or mousse inside, so that the cut slice is a picture. Recipes of this kind appear in American household books around the turn of the century because packed ice and commercial ice delivery had made frozen desserts practical outside professional kitchens, and a molded bombe was the showpiece a hostess could produce for a dinner without a pastry cook. Blood oranges, imported from Sicily and Malta, were a winter luxury item in American markets of the period.