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Ice Cream, Estelle
Prepare a pint of vanilla ice cream. Pick off stems, wash and drain a pint of fresh strawberries, press through a fine sieve into a copper basin and add five egg yolks, four ounces sugar and two tablespoons curacao. Set the basin on range and briskly whisk for ten minutes, remove from fire, place basin on ice and stir with wooden spoon until thoroughly cold, then add a half pint whipped cream and gently mix with skimmer for two minutes. Remove stem and stones from half pint fresh sweet cherries, place them in a bowl with two tablespoons sugar, a tablespoon maraschino, and mix well. Set a dome-shaped quart mould on broken, salted ice, line mould all around with a pint of vanilla, arrange cherries against vanilla, then fill up mould with strawberry preparation, place a sheet of white paper on top, cover tightly, bury mould in a tub with broken ice and rock salt and freeze for two hours. Remove, immerse mould in tepid water, wipe all around, unmould on a cold dish, decorate all around with whipped cream and serve.
This is a bombe: a domed mould lined with plain ice cream and filled with a frozen sabayon-style mousse. The work is mostly assembly, but the whisked yolk base is where it succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: cook the sabayon over water, not over direct heat"Set the basin on range and briskly whisk for ten minutes" assumes a copper basin over a coal range and a cook who can feel the heat through the metal. Use a bowl over barely simmering water and whisk until the mixture thickens and holds a ribbon, about 160F on an instant-read thermometer, which also brings the yolks to a safe temperature. On a modern burner over direct heat the mixture can scramble very quickly.
- Copper basinA copper zabaglione bowl conducts fast and evenly, and contact with the acidic fruit is brief. Any wide stainless or glass bowl over a saucepan works; avoid aluminium, which discolours acidic fruit.
- QuantitiesA pint here is 2 cups. A pint of strawberries yields roughly 3/4 cup of sieved purée; four ounces of sugar is 1/2 cup plus a spoonful. "A half pint whipped cream" is ambiguous; read as cream measured before whipping it is 1 cup of cream, whipped to soft peaks.
- Curacao and maraschinoBoth are still made. Curacao is the orange liqueur; maraschino here is the clear Luxardo-style cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries. The alcohol also keeps the mousse layer from freezing rock hard.
- SkimmerThe flat perforated skimmer is what this recipe folds with. A large rubber spatula does the same job with less deflation.
- Freezing without an ice caveThe tub of broken ice and rock salt is the method the recipe assumes. A dome mould or metal bowl, covered with a sheet of parchment and then foil pressed tight, will set firm in a home freezer, though it needs four to six hours rather than two, and overnight is better.
- Lining the mouldLet the vanilla soften just enough to spread, then press it up the sides in an even layer and refreeze it hard before the cherries and mousse go in. Filling a soft-lined mould collapses the shell and the two layers marble together.
- UnmouldingTepid water means tepid: a few seconds only, then wipe and invert. Hot water melts a glaze onto the surface that refreezes cloudy.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight, cut in wedges. Return the unmoulded bombe to the freezer for fifteen minutes before decorating with whipped cream if the kitchen is warm.
The bombe belongs to the classical French repertoire that American hotel and club cooking absorbed wholesale, and this book is a fair sample of it: a moulded frozen sweet with a plain outer casing, a richer mousse or parfait centre and something whole and jewel-like buried inside. Naming such dishes after women, singers, patrons or the wives of proprietors, was standard practice in that kitchen culture, so an "Estelle" here tells you almost nothing about the dish and a good deal about the convention; Escoffier's lists run to dozens of similarly christened bombes. The technique itself predates mechanical refrigeration entirely and depends on the salt-and-ice bath, which drops the brine well below the freezing point of water and lets a sealed mould set solid in a couple of hours. Curacao and maraschino were the workhorse flavouring liqueurs of the period's pastry kitchen.