No. 3440

Bomb a la Trobriand and Fifth Avenue

Bombe a la Trobriand et a la Cinquieme Avenue

Imbed a bomb-shaped mold (Fig. 627) in ice; remove its lid and coat it perpendicularly, half with strawberry ice cream (No. 3451) and half with pistachio (No. 3454). Fill the inside with the following preparation: Pound seven ounces of filberts or sweet almonds; moisten little at a time with a pint of water and three gills of thirty-five degree syrup. Break eighteen egg-yolks in a saucepan or tinned copper basin, add the almond milk and a pint of boiling milk; set it on a slow fire and stir steadily until sufficiently cooked so that it covers the spatula; strain through a sieve, return it to the well-cleaned basin, and add the same quantity of thoroughly drained whipped cream. Fill up the coated mold, cover with paper, put on its lid, imbed in salted ice, and if the mold contains two quarts freeze it for one hour and a half.

For Fifth Avenue Bomb.—Have the same preparation; coat the mold with strawberry ice cream only when it is frozen; dip in hot water, unmold on a napkin, and decorate with small cakes.

← No. 3439 Bomb a la Constantine Ices & Ice Creams No. 3441 Printanier Fruit Bomb →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's bombe is two recipes in one: a lined, molded ice built in a salt-and-ice bath, and a rich almond-milk custard base to fill it. Most of the work is timing and temperature rather than technique.

The hinge: line the mold cold and fastThe strawberry and pistachio ice creams must be firm enough to hold a vertical wall but soft enough to spread — roughly the texture of ice cream straight from the churn. Press the lining in with a chilled spoon, then freeze the lined mold hard before you pour in the filling, or the two will bleed together.
Gills and quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so three gills of syrup is 1½ cups. The nut milk is made with a pint of water plus that 1½ cups of syrup, so it is already more than a pint before the eighteen yolks and the pint of boiling milk go in — an extremely rich base by modern standards. With an equal quantity of whipped cream folded in at the end, the whole formula makes well over two quarts; halving it gives something nearer a quart and a half.
Thirty-five degree syrupAlmost certainly degrees Baumé, read with a saccharometer, not a temperature. Thirty-five degrees is a very heavy syrup, in the region of 65 Brix — roughly two pounds of sugar dissolved per pint of water. If you have no hydrometer, work from a standard heavy syrup and expect to adjust sweetness.
FilbertsHazelnuts. Pounding them with water and syrup and straining makes a nut milk; a blender does it in seconds, but squeeze the pulp through cloth rather than a sieve or the custard will be gritty.
Cooking the custard"Covers the spatula" is nappe — the custard coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when you draw a finger through it, about 180F. Beyond that the yolks scramble; strain regardless, as the recipe directs.
Chill before folding the creamThe recipe says nothing about cooling the custard before the whipped cream goes in. Fold in the cream only when the base is thoroughly cold, or the cream will deflate and the bombe will freeze dense.
Freezing without a salt-ice bathAn hour and a half works because brine conducts heat away far faster than still freezer air, not because it is dramatically colder. In a domestic freezer allow four to six hours for a two-quart mold, and overnight is better. A metal mold sets faster than plastic.
UnmoldingDip the mold in hot water for a few seconds only, wipe it, and turn it out onto a chilled plate. Longer and the outer layer of ice cream — the decorative one — melts first.
YieldThe two-quart mold serves twelve to sixteen in slices. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water between cuts.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his long tenure as chef at Delmonico's, and the ices section reads like a guest list: dishes were routinely named for patrons, occasions and the restaurant's own address. The Fifth Avenue variant almost certainly nods to Delmonico's Madison Square house at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street; the Trobriand name may be a compliment to R he French-born New York figure and Union general well known in the city's Franco-American society, though nothing confirms it. The bombe itself is generally said to take its name from the mold's shape — the round, fused shell of an old mortar bomb — and the form relied on the ice-and-salt method: a lined mold buried in brine freezes from the outside in, which is precisely what lets a chef build a shell of one ice around a core of another. That such a dessert appears here in dozens of variations says a good deal about how much labor a nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen could throw at ice, decades before mechanical refrigeration made it routine.