Not the Bombe

A lot of people got a very peculiar idea of a bombe from the 1978 movie “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” The film shows chef Natasha O’Brien (Jacqueline Bisset) building up a huge hemispherical structure by piling one kind of frosting on another: chocolate, raspberry, whipped cream. It doesn’t go into a freezer until it’s done, and apparently it’s something between a mousse and a marshmallow, because restaurateur George Segal can stick his fingers into it, leaving tell-tale holes.

The novel on which the film was based (“Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe” by Nan and Ivan Lyons) does describe a real bombe. It even gives the recipe for it: Fill a mold with layers of strawberry sorbet, chocolate-almond ice cream and Grand Marnier-chocolate bombe mixture, sticking the whole thing in a freezer to harden for a couple of hours between each step. When it’s ready to serve, frost it with whipped cream.

It looks as if the filmmakers saw some late 19th century bombe designs and figured their elaborate frostings looked cooler than just a lot of whipped cream, because movie-Natasha spends a good deal of time piping swags of frosting onto her bombe. Then they apparently decided they might as well pretend that a bombe is a sort of cake that’s mostly frosting.

Escoffier would have been horrified. And by the way, he would have asked book-Natasha why she called her chocolate-almond-raspberry-Grand Marnier concoction a bombe Richelieu (see Bombe Richelieu recipe on this page).