Bombe Formosa

Bombe Formosa (a vanilla-lined strawberry ice-cream dome) teaches temperature before anything else. The vanilla shell must be firm before the filling arrives, the pâte à bombe (a yolk foam cooked with hot sugar syrup) must be cool before it meets whipped cream, and the finished bombe must freeze through before you ask it to stand. Get those temperatures right and the slice is a small triumph: ivory outside, strawberry pink within, whole berries declaring themselves at every cut.

The book assumed a pâtissier with churned ices ready, deep metal bombe moulds packed in salt and ice, and enough hands to coat them in repeated rounds. At home, good vanilla ice cream is the finished component the entry itself calls for, a 1.5-litre metal bowl replaces the specialist mould, and the freezer replaces the ice chest. The repeated re-icing was brigade scaffolding, so it goes. Clothing the mould with vanilla, filling it with strawberry bombe preparation and the large whole berries the entry specifies, then sealing and freezing it solid, those steps are the dish and they stay. One cook, one stove, one evening; the freezer keeps watch after that.

Cool the pâte à bombe completely before folding in the cream. That is the one step that decides the texture, because warm yolk foam melts the air you worked to build and gives you a heavy, icy centre.