Home › Frozen Desserts › Bombe Glacé
Bombe Glacé
Line a chilled bombe mold with frozen strawberries or grape sherbet and fill the center with vanilla ice cream. Cover the top with more sherbet; press down the lid over a sheet of paper, making it fit closely so that no salt can get in. Let stand in ice and salt for an hour or more.
A bombe is an assembly job rather than a cooked dish: two or more already-frozen mixtures packed into a mold and left to firm into one mass. Everything depends on temperature control at the moment you build it.
- "Frozen strawberries" means a water ice"Frozen strawberries" most likely means a water ice -- in a book of this period the phrase almost certainly denotes a strawberry water ice or sherbet rather than the thawing bag of berries in a modern freezer. Use any firm fruit sherbet or sorbet.
- The moldA bombe mold is a lidded metal dome or melon shape, roughly 1 to 2 quarts. A metal mixing bowl, a pudding basin or a loaf pan lined with plastic wrap all work; you simply lose the classic silhouette.
- Chill everything hard firstThe hinge of the whole recipe. Mold, spatula and sherbet all need to be very cold, or the lining slumps down the sides while you are spreading it. Put the mold in the freezer an hour ahead and work in short bursts, returning it to the cold whenever the surface starts to gloss.
- Lining thicknessAim for about half an inch of sherbet pressed evenly up the walls, leaving a clean hollow for the ice cream. Freeze the lining solid before filling the center, otherwise the two layers marble into each other and the cut slice loses its ring.
- The sheet of paperParchment or waxed paper laid over the filling before the lid goes on keeps brine from seeping through the seam. With a modern freezer, press plastic wrap directly onto the surface and add foil over the lid to slow freezer burn.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerThe original packs the sealed mold in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, which holds it well below freezing. A home freezer does the same job; give it 3 to 4 hours rather than the hour specified, since it runs warmer than a salt bath.
- UnmoldingDip the closed mold in warm water for five to ten seconds, wipe it dry so no brine or water runs onto the dessert, invert onto a chilled plate. If it resists, repeat briefly rather than prying.
- Yield and servingA 1 1/2-quart bombe serves 8 to 10. Let it stand 5 minutes before slicing with a hot dry knife, and serve on chilled plates.
The bombe takes its name from its shape, a spherical or ogival mold said to resemble a cannonball or shell, and it belongs to the French repertoire that American cookbooks absorbed wholesale. Escoffier codified dozens of named bombes, each a specific pairing of an outer casing and an inner mixture, and hostesses on this side of the Atlantic borrowed the form as a showpiece at the end of a formal dinner. The ice-and-salt packing described here is the same method used with hand-cranked freezers and ice deliveries, before mechanical household refrigeration was common in American kitchens. The instruction about keeping salt out of the mold is the tell: brine seeping past a loose lid was a real and ruinous hazard.