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Bombe Souveraine
Prepare a pint only vanilla ice cream. Boil a gill water in a small enamelled pan, add half ounce best quality tea, cover the pan and let stand on a table to infuse until required. Place five egg yolks in a copper basin with two ounces sugar; place the basin on a corner of the range and beat up with a whisk for eight minutes. Take from the range, set the basin on the ice, and briskly mix with the wooden spoon until thoroughly cold. Then strain the tea through a cheesecloth into this basin, mix a little, then add a half pint whipped cream and gently mix with a skimmer. Set a bomb-shaped quart mould on the ice. Line the bottom and sides with the prepared vanilla ice cream, fill up the interior with the tea preparation, line the top with a sheet of white paper, tightly cover; bury it in the vanilla ice-cream pail, with plenty of ice and rock salt around, for one and a half hours. Take up, dip in lukewarm water for a few seconds, unmould upon a cold dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A classic two-part bombe: a shell of vanilla ice cream around a tea-flavoured bombe mixture (cooked yolks, sugar and whipped cream). Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes a coal range, a salt-and-ice freezing pail, and a cook who already knows what a bombe should look like.
- The hinge: get the yolks properly cooked and properly cold"A corner of the range" means gentle, indirect heat — use a bowl over barely simmering water and whisk constantly until the mixture is thick, pale and reads 160F on an instant-read thermometer. Then chill it fast over ice; if it is even slightly warm when the whipped cream goes in, the cream deflates and the centre freezes hard instead of staying mousse-like.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. That is a very small amount of water for half an ounce of tea, which is deliberate — you want a concentrated infusion, since it will be diluted by five yolks and half a pint of cream.
- Half an ounce of teaRoughly 14 g, about 6 to 7 teaspoons of loose leaf. Steeping it covered off the heat until needed will make it bitter and tannic with a modern black tea; 5 minutes is enough, then strain. A good Ceylon or Earl Grey works; the tannin is what keeps the centre from tasting merely of sweet cream.
- Copper basin and skimmerThe unlined copper basin was standard for whisking eggs and is not required — any heatproof bowl will do. The "skimmer" is a flat perforated spoon used here purely as a folding tool; a rubber spatula folds the cream in with less loss.
- Freezing without a pailThe mould is buried in ice and rock salt because there were no home freezers. A modern freezer set to 0F does the same job, but allow 4 to 6 hours rather than an hour and a half, and press plastic wrap or parchment directly against the surface before covering. If you do use ice and salt, roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume.
- Lining the mouldLet the vanilla ice cream soften just enough to spread, then press it up the sides in an even layer about half an inch thick and refreeze the shell solid before filling it. Filling a soft shell collapses the walls and you lose the two-tone cross-section that is the whole point.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in lukewarm water, not hot — hot water melts a slick of ice cream that then refreezes cloudy. The folded napkin on the cold dish absorbs meltwater and keeps the bombe from sliding.
- YieldA quart mould gives 6 to 8 servings. Cut in wedges at the table so the vanilla ring and tea centre show.
The bombe glacée takes its name from the mould: a spherical or ogival copper form said to resemble an old cannon shell. The usual pattern is an outer casing of one ice cream, a softer, richer mixture bound with cooked yolks and whipped cream at the centre, though three layers, fruit garnishes and other variations occur — and the endless roster of names (souveraine, africaine, duchesse, and dozens more) served as shorthand in professional kitchens for particular flavour pairings rather than describing anything about the dish itself. Tea as a flavouring for frozen desserts belongs to the same late-Victorian taste that produced tea sorbets and tea creams, and it may owe something to the fact that Filippini wrote out of the Delmonico's tradition, where the ice course was expected to be different at every dinner. The instruction to bury the mould in the ice-cream pail with rock salt is the giveaway that this is a pre-refrigeration book: the freezing brine, along with plain ice and the icebox, did the work that mechanical cold does now.