Passport & Plate - Cheese Bombe
United Kingdom | Wednesday, March 4, 2015 | 4 photos
Ingredients
300g tub of cottage cheese
80-100g finely grated blue cheese eg Stilton, Danish Blue, Shropshire Blue
80- 100g finely grated other hard cheese - cheddar, Red Leicester, Wensleydale
1 sachet of instant asparagus soup mix
3 x spring onions
Tabasco to taste
Walnut pieces, finely chopped
How to prepare this recipe1. Having grated all your cheeses, mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl excluding the chopped walnuts. Using a potato masher is ideal. Add more soup mix if required. The flavours meld upon standing/ chilling.
2. Form two round bombe shapes (slightly larger than a cricket ball). This is best done with your hands. If the mixture is a little sticky, you may need to refrigerate the mix a little so it firms up.
3. Pat chopped walnuts over the top of each bombe and roll the bases in walnuts also so they're both well covered.
4. Place bombes in clingfilm and chill in the 'fridge. These also freeze well if required at a later date (seventies themed dinner parties are ideal!).
5. Remove from the 'fridge before serving to bring to room temperature and serve in slices, like a cake, with oatcakes, crackers, warm bread, celery. Bon apetite!
The story behind this recipeIt’s summer 1976. Even in the early morning, heat is shimmering off the tarmac as my mother takes me to infant school. Parched-looking trees hang still in the breezeless hot house day. We walk our normal route: cross a road and to the right, past the local film studio. I glance beyond the studio entrance to the roundabout opposite. There are extras part-costumed from the latest film shooting there; practicing somersaults and tumbles for a scene they’re shooting later. The film is the first Star Wars film, the actors are stuntmen in storm trooper outfits. But I only realise this later. Because what I’m mulling is something far more important. Tonight mum is making one of my favourites – a cheese bombe. I still don’t know the origin of this savoury explosion of dairy delight. For me, events have always been punctuated by food memories, encapsulated by layers of flavour. The cheese bombe, a grown-up cheese and pineapple hedgehog, was always served at mum’s dinner parties, accompanied by other seventies classics: a prawn cocktail, steak au poivre, dauphinoise potatoes, the bombe, and home-made profiteroles croquembouche. The height of seventies dinner party sophistication, when we weren’t eating cheese fondue with Swiss family friends. The cheese bombe has and always will feature in my dinner parties when paying homage to my infant memories of food. Haute cuisine it’s not, but it is one of several foundation block dishes my mother laid as I observed her culinary escapades. I’ve inherited her joy in planning, preparation, and ultimately cooking every dish which was created with love, passion for flavour and the pleasure of seeing guests delight at every mouthful of her food. Every mouthful of the savoury cheese bombe is a flash back to those dinner parties. As the flavours hit by tongue, I’m a little girl again, in awe of my mother in her maxi dress, wheeling the heated dinner trolley into the dining room, revealing the spectacle of the next course.
