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Bombe Sultana
Line a mold with pistachio ice cream, sprinkle over the bottom and sides sultana raisins which have been soaked in brandy for one hour. Fill the center with vanilla ice cream. Serve with Claret Sauce. See chapter on Puddings and Pudding Sauces.
A bombe is an assembly job rather than a cooking one, and it succeeds or fails on the temperature of the ice cream at each stage. The original assumes a metal bombe mold and a bucket of ice and rock salt; a modern freezer does the same work with more patience.
- The hinge: lining the moldSoften the pistachio ice cream only until it is spreadable, like thick frosting, then press it up the sides of a chilled metal mold in an even layer about half an inch thick. If it melts to a pourable state it will slide to the bottom and the finished bombe will have no shell. Freeze the lining solid for at least an hour before filling the center.
- Sultanas and brandySultanas are golden seedless raisins. One hour in brandy is the minimum; they plump better in two or three, and the alcohol keeps them from freezing into pebbles. Drain them before use so loose brandy does not soften the ice cream lining.
- Press the fruit in, do not scatter"Sprinkle over the bottom and sides" works only if the raisins are pressed into the still-soft pistachio layer. Sprinkled onto a frozen shell they will simply fall into the vanilla center when the mold is turned out.
- Pistachio ice creamPeriod recipes generally made this at home with pounded pistachios, and green tinting, sometimes from spinach juice, was used to reinforce the colour. Much supermarket pistachio ice cream today is pale and closer to almond in flavour; a good gelato-counter pistachio gives the colour contrast the dish depends on.
- Freezing timeAfter filling the center, cover the mold with foil or its lid and freeze at least six hours, preferably overnight. A mold packed in ice and salt, as period kitchens would have done, chills by direct contact and so sets faster than the still air of a domestic freezer.
- UnmoldingDip the sealed mold in warm water for five to ten seconds, run a thin knife around the rim, invert onto a chilled platter, and give it one firm shake. Then return the bombe to the freezer for fifteen minutes to firm the surface before slicing.
- Claret sauceThe cross-referenced sauce is not given here; claret sauces of the period are typically red wine simmered with sugar, sometimes with a strip of lemon peel and a little cornstarch or arrowroot to thicken. A cool rather than hot sauce will do less damage to the slices on the plate.
- YieldA one-and-a-half quart mold serves eight to ten in wedges. Slice with a knife dipped in hot water and wiped between cuts so the two colors stay distinct.
A bombe glacée takes its name from the round, cannonball-shaped molds used for it in nineteenth-century French kitchens, and the form was codified in the grand-restaurant repertoire of the period, where dozens of named combinations circulated with more or less consistency. "Sultana" here points to the raisin rather than to any Ottoman connection: sultanas, imported dried from Smyrna and later Australia, were the fashionable plump seedless raisin of the era and turn up steeped in spirits throughout the dessert cookery of the period. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from a pattern and fashion publisher writing for middle-class American households, and its ice-cream chapter is a fair index of how far the ice-and-salt freezer had spread by then — the dish is set down in three sentences, on the assumption that the reader already has two flavors of ice cream and a mold to hand.