From top to bottom, each spoonful of Lhardy's soufflé incorporates three flavors and as many addictive textures. At the base, a layer of sponge cake, on top of vanilla ice cream and covering it all with a blanket of silk-textured meringue. Arranged on a metal tray, it is placed in the oven with the ice cream inside for several seconds before being flambéed on the table. Sweet and slightly salty, cold and warm sensations swirl in the mouth, with notes of aged rum as a counterpoint.
It was not in Lhardy where I discovered this dessert for the first time, but in Casa Solla, in Pontevedra, a restaurant where years ago the parents of the well-known chef Pepe Solla made it, who still prepares it to order.
The stories that precede it are no strangers to the emotion that continues to awaken me. “Before becoming a chef, Emilio Huguenin Lhardy worked as a pastry chef, his true profession,” Pascual Hernández, current director of the Lhardy restaurant, told me days ago. “On one of his tours of Paris he met the norvégienne omelet and the legendary clarified consommé, two icons of Café Hardy on the Boulevard des Italianes, a famous enclave in Paris throughout the 19th century. He managed to obtain both recipes, transported them to Madrid and incorporated them into Lhardy's offer. First to the shop and pastry shop that he had founded in 1837 and shortly after to the restaurant that opened its doors in 1839. They are the only two specialties that have survived the passage of time. And of course, the most popular in our house, including the cooked one.”
The question that any fan can ask is obvious. Who invented the so-called Alaska soufflé, norvégienne omelet or whatever we want to call it? Surprising as it may be, the honor does not fall to any pastry chef, but to an American physicist, one Benjamin Thompson, a native of Massachusetts, who, while studying the laws of thermodynamics and designing coffee makers, kettles and other kitchen utensils, is supposed to have created the recipe in 1804. Its purpose was none other than to demonstrate that egg whites beaten until stiff constituted a powerful thermal insulation capable of protecting any ice cream subjected to the heat of the oven. In other words, a sweet derivative of physical science. It is also curious that in the vicissitudes of gastronomic history two countries, the United States and France, continue to dispute the paternity of such a delicacy.
“You already know that in North America soufflé is known as baked Alaska”, Hernandez told me. “When the United States bought Alaska from Russia in the mid-19th century, the American Secretary of State, a certain Willian Seward, decided to celebrate it in New York, at Delmonico's Restaurant, an occasion in which a French chef, Charles Ranhofer, prepared the famous sweet based on the research by Benjamin Thompson. The occasion turned out to be a no-brainer and with all the excitement of the moment, it was called Alaska soufflé, an unequivocally American sweet. The year was 1867″.
From Europe, and specifically from France, things are seen differently. Who dares to refute our neighbors, always so chauvinistic, that the norvégienne omelet, which is neither omelet nor of Norwegian origin, is it strictly French? Among allusions blurred by time, the supposed Gallic paternity begins at the Paris International Exhibition, organized by Napoleon III in 1867 (the same year of the purchase of Alaska) to demonstrate the greatness of the Second Empire. Apparently, at a dinner organized with the pageantry of great occasions, the chef of the Grand Hotel in Paris, who some historians of the cause call Balzac, decided to create a special sweet inspired by the experiments of Benjamin Thompson, Count of Rumford. Bridging the gap, something similar to the work of our avant-garde chefs in past decades. Such would be the origin of the norvégienne omelet, an ice cream protected by a meringue that was baked and flamed in full view to the amazement of the diners. It is true that at that time the American physicist was running around Europe and that as a member of the French Institute under the regime of Napoleon III he carried out much of his scientific research in the neighboring country. The allusion to Norway is another of the unknowns that surround it. In one way or another, the dessert became a classic of French pastries in the last third of the 19th century. Curiously, in Norway, where it is popular at the end of the year festival, they call it fransk isbombeFrench ice bomb.
At Lhardy it is made by a young pastry chef from Madrid, Darien Medranda, who, faithful to the tradition of the house, complies with the historical recipe and adapts to the requests he receives from each table. From the individual souffle that he charges at 11 euros to the most voluminous ones for entire tables that he prepares on the spot within 10 minutes. An old monument as brilliant as ever despite having more than two centuries of history.
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