Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Noisette Bomb
Noisette Bomb
1/2 tablespoon vanilla Strawberry Ice I ½ cup sugar ½ cup chopped blanched filberts ¾ cup hot caramel syrup Yolks 4 eggs ½ cups heavy cream 1⅓ tablespoon vanilla Few grains salt Caramelize sugar, add nut meats, turn into a buttered pan, cool, then pound in mortar and put through a purée strainer. Beat egg yolks until thick, add gradually caramel syrup, and cook in double boiler until mixture thickens; then beat until cold. Fold in cream beaten until stiff. Then add prepared nut meats, vanilla, and salt. Line melon mould with ice, turn in mixture, pack in salt and ice, and let stand three hours. 3 cups milk 1½ cups sugar Yolks 5 eggs
A bombe glacée: a mould lined with one frozen mixture and filled with another. Here the lining is strawberry ice and the filling is a caramel-hazelnut custard cream, frozen still (without churning) in a packed mould.
- Noisette means hazelnutFilberts and hazelnuts are treated as the same nut in American cookbooks of this period; "noisette" is simply the French name. Strictly, "blanched" here means scalded in boiling water and slipped out of the skins; toasting in a moderate oven until the skins crack and rubbing them off in a towel does the same job. The book itself gives no oven temperature.
- The caramel-nut paste is the flavourCaramelizing the sugar, stirring in the nuts, cooling the sheet hard, then grinding it is exactly how praline paste is made. A food processor replaces the mortar and the purée strainer; run it until the mass turns oily and smooth rather than sandy, or it will freeze into grit.
- Caramel syrupHot caramel syrup here is sugar cooked to a deep amber and then let down with a little boiling water so it pours. It must be hot but not scalding when it goes into the yolks, and it must go in slowly or the yolks will scramble.
- The custard is the hingeCook the yolk-and-caramel mixture over simmering, not boiling, water only until it coats a spoon — around 170-175F. Then beat it cold before folding in the whipped cream, or the cream will deflate and the bombe will freeze dense.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe vanilla quantity was checked against the printed page and reads as our text now gives it. Some measurements remain unclear: the cream is given as "½ cups" and the strawberry ice base as "1½ cups sugar," so scale these to a mould you actually own.
- Lining the mouldA melon mould is a two-piece metal form, usually fastened with clips rather than hinged, and they run from about a quart to two quarts. Chill it hard, then press a half-inch shell of softened ice (the recipe says only "line melon mould with ice" and does not name the flavour) against the walls with the back of a spoon, freeze the shell solid, and only then fill the centre.
- Salt and ice, or a freezerPacking means burying the sealed mould in a bucket of crushed ice mixed with rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, which brings the brine well below freezing. A modern freezer at 0F will do the same work; allow four to six hours rather than three, and unmould by dipping the form briefly in cool water.
- YieldA filled 1½-quart mould serves ten to twelve, cut in wedges. Serve it the day it is made — still-frozen creams without churning coarsen quickly.
Bombes belong to the elaborate end of nineteenth-century ice work, when a household with an ice-house or a reliable iceman could freeze a moulded dessert in a bucket of salt and ice and turn it out striped in two colours. The names follow French pastry usage: noisette for hazelnut, so a noisette bombe is a hazelnut-praline cream. The praline itself — sugar caramelized over nuts, cooled, and pounded to a paste — is much older than the ice, and is generally traced to French confectionery of the seventeenth century; grinding it in a mortar and forcing it through a strainer was the standard way to get a smooth paste before mechanical grinders reached domestic kitchens.