Sorbonne Flambee

Sorbonne Flambee

(A meringue glazed with chocolate, garnished with cherries and blazing with new vodka.)

I'd been waiting for this recipe for ages, primarily because I have trained as a pastry chef, and secondly, because I'm not very good at cooking meringue. Well, I always think I'm not. Actually the meringue wasn't too bad - at first.

I'd wondered how to present this meringue, and thought about piping it in the shape of a square, to represent one of the courtyards where Situationist leaflets were thrown from the windows of the Salle Jules Bonnot. Even with supporting meringue columns I didn't know how this would hold up when being cooked, and so I thought about another thing instead. 

On the internet there seem to be no copies of the photo that appears in Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, 1968 (attributed to Renè Viénet but written while these recipes were being invented), but which I have reproduced below. I would like to say that the quality of the photos in the edition of the book I have are dire (I have the Rebel Press edition).

You can just about see that around the inside of the dome is written "I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires". Like many other people I have loved this graffiti for decades, and it's something I truly believe in, but when I saw it as it had been written here - on the walls of the Sorbonne, in such a fantastic way - it changed something that I can't really quantify or explain, and it has enriched it all for me hugely. 

So I thought about the dome, and meringue, and piped it into a mound which would fill in the space of the dome. I baked this, the words and voice of my pastry teacher firmly in my head, and it wasn't too bad. It cooked fine, but by the time I had melted chocolate, bought cherries as the ones I had been keeping had vanished, all the rest, it had started to crack a bit, but whatever.

Because I know, theoretically, that sugar and alcohol are both flammable, I took the finished dessert into the garden, and poured vodka on it. It didn't light when I offered the match to it, and this happened about ten times. Eventually it started burning inside, and even with some small flames :

So it burned a bit, smelt a lot, and was a bit disappointing slightly, but also incredibly mad fun to do. Once when my family were entertaining both mine and my sister's boyfriends, my mum cooked Crepes Suzette, and set fire to them. I'm not sure what effect this had on our relationships, but it was certainly memorable. Setting fire to a dessert is to make it special - Christmas Pudding, Baked Alaska and it's visual and fun and exciting. So was this. 

Whenever I have been holding the match there, trying to set fire to either the lobster or this, a tiny voice in my head has been whispering 'maybe he got it all wrong,'. Actually, voice in my head, he didn't. A while ago I took part in a conference where someone called Debord 'a bastard', and while my first instincts might have been unseemly in a conference setting, I'm not sure they were totally out of place. I love Debord and his ideas unreasonably, and very romantically, and I am not going to be persuaded otherwise. His cooking might leave something to be desired, but his ideas, never.

I will be writing a concluding post in the next couple of days, about how doing this has changed any of my feelings and things that I have learned from it. I would say that doing this I have encountered advice, bafflement and much support and interest. And it's been great.