Bombe Odette

Bombe Odette (a vanilla ice cream shell with a praline yolk-and-cream centre) teaches one true thing before you touch the pan: cold mutes flavour. The Pralin, nuts enclosed in caramel and ground fine, must begin with caramel taken to a decisive deep amber. Pale caramel tastes only of sugar once frozen, however handsome it looked in the saucepan.

The original gives a brigade its orders in a sentence: clothe the mould with vanilla ice cream, then fill it with pralined bombe preparation. It assumed a pastry cook, ice cream already made, a freezing cabinet always ready, and a mould rocked over broken ice as patiently as an aspic. Your honest equivalent is good full-fat vanilla ice cream, a 1.25 litre metal mould or deep bowl, and an ordinary freezer. The broken-ice operation is brigade scaffolding and can go; the even vanilla shell and freshly made pâte à bombe, yolks expanded with hot sugar syrup and lightened with cream, are the dish and must stay. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Take the caramel to deep amber before the nuts enter, then work quickly. If it smells scorched, don't bargain with it; begin again. That colour is the one step that decides whether Bombe Odette tastes richly pralined or merely sweet.