No. 3481

Plombiere a la Richmond

Make a Genoese biscuit preparation as herewith described: Mix in a basin one pound of powdered sugar, twelve whole eggs and a grain of salt; beat this over a slow fire, and remove to incorporate slowly one pound of sifted flour and one pound of warm melted butter, also the well-chopped peel of an orange. Take a round mold seven inches in diameter by one and a half in depth; butter and flour the interior, then fill it three-quarters full with the preparation, and bake in a slack oven; spread the remainder of the paste on a sheet of paper to a quarter of an inch in thickness, and bake this also in a hot oven. After removing the thin biscuit from the fire cut it into half rounds two inches in diameter with a channeled pastry cutter (Fig. 16); leave them to cool, coat over with apricot marmalade (No. 3675), then cover with a layer of orange sugar icing (No. 102). When the round Genoese is cooked and cold, apricot it over, and in the center, on the apricot, place a round piece of strong paper six inches in diameter, and ice the whole with rum icing (No. 102). Lay it on a grate and make an incision around the biscuit at half an inch from the edge; remove the icing and paper from the center; scoop out the cake; set it on a dish, and put it on ice until ready to serve. Imbed a plombiere mold (Fig. 632) on ice; fill the bottom and sides with a coating of maraschino ice cream (No. 3462), and fill the inside with a preparation made with three-quarters of a pound of pounded roasted hazel-nuts, adding slowly a quart of cream to them; put this into a vessel with an orange peel, infuse for one hour, and strain forcibly through a fine sieve; add a gill of vanilla syrup (No. 3165) and eight ounces of sugar, freeze, then put in as much whipped cream. Mold it in layers, alternating each one with hazel-nut macaroons (No. 3386). Then unmold the plombiere into the cavity of the cake, surround the base of the plombiere with the above half-rounds of Genoese, and serve separately a sauce made with well-drained whipped cream flavored with kirsch, to which has been added candied apricots cut in small squares of a quarter of an inch, previously macerated in kirsch.

← No. 3480 Plombiere a la Montesquieu Ices & Ice Creams No. 3482 Plombiere a la Rochambeau →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a composed dessert in the Delmonico's manner: a hollowed Genoese shell, a molded ice cream bombe, iced half-rounds of cake around the base, and a kirsch cream sauce. Read it as four separate jobs done over two days rather than one recipe.

The hingeEverything depends on the moulded ice being frozen hard and the hollowed cake shell being thoroughly chilled before the two meet. Unmould the plombière into a room-temperature shell and the maraschino lining slumps within minutes; both components should sit in the freezer until the moment of assembly.
Oven temperaturesA "slack" oven for the deep round Genoese is usually taken as somewhere around 300-325F; the recipe gives no time, and a 7-inch pan will want watching from about the three-quarter-hour mark. The thin sheet spread a quarter-inch on paper goes into a "hot" oven, perhaps 425F, for only a few minutes; it is meant to be cut with the channeled cutter while barely coloured.
The Genoese methodOne pound sugar to twelve eggs to one pound flour to one pound butter is a very rich sponge. Whisk sugar and eggs over gentle heat only to blood heat, about 110F, then off the heat to full ribbon; the flour and the warm butter are folded in last, butter down the side of the bowl so it does not knock out the air.
A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The vanilla syrup it measures is a sugar syrup, not extract, and it carries a good deal of the sweetness of the hazelnut ice.
"Apricot it over"Brush with warmed, sieved apricot marmalade (No. 3675). It seals the crumb so the icing does not soak in.
The paper discThe six-inch round of stiff paper is a mask. Ice the whole top, then cut in half an inch from the edge, lift off paper and icing together, and you are left with a clean iced rim around an open cavity. Baking parchment works; cut it a shade smaller than you think you need.
Moulds and equipmentThe plombière mould here is a shaped metal mould set into ice (Fig. 632); such moulds were typically lidded and packed round with ice, usually with salt. A modern approach is a metal bombe mould or a straight-sided bowl lined with plastic film, filled and frozen hard; churn both ices in a machine rather than working them by hand in a freezing pot.
The hazelnut iceThree-quarters of a pound of roasted hazelnuts pounded to a paste, infused an hour in a quart of cream with orange peel, then pressed through a sieve. Straining "forcibly" matters: the flavour is in what goes through, and any grit left behind will read as sandy once frozen.
YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings; a seven-inch shell and its bombe would stretch to a party rather than a family. The Genoese batter plainly makes far more than the mould holds, and the recipe puts the surplus to use as the thin sheet for the fluted half-rounds.

A Little History

Plombières is an iced cream stiffened with almonds or nuts and enriched with whipped cream, usually scented with kirsch or maraschino and studded with candied fruit; the name is generally traced to the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. By the time Charles Ranhofer set down The Epicurean in 1894, after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, the plombière had become a vehicle for the elaborate moulded ice: a bombe of two frozen preparations, set into an iced cake case and dressed with a separate sauce. The suffix "à la Richmond" belongs to the restaurant habit of naming a composition after a place, a patron or an occasion, and tells you nothing about the ingredients; Ranhofer's book runs to hundreds of such titles. What the recipe does record is the labour available in a great nineteenth-century kitchen, where pounding nuts, infusing cream, churning two ices and masking a cake with paper and icing were the work of several hands in a single afternoon.