School friends Sam Bompas and Harry Parr struck up their unique culinary partnership in 2007 after noting a distinct lack of gourmet desserts that were fresh, light and, well, fun. Looking back to the gastronomic inventiveness of Victorian times, they hit upon their recipe for success, embarking upon a wobbly quest to resurrect the jelly as a spectacular haute sweet. Now famed for their astounding gelatinous creations (past jellies include miniature renditions of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Taj Mahal), Bompas & Parr also grabbed headlines for mounting spectacular events such as 2008’s "Architectural Punchbowl", in which a building on London’s Portland Place was flooded with four tonnes of Courvoisier, and their upcoming “Ziggurat of Flavor”, a full-scale stepped temple, filled with a vaporized fruit mist. We caught up with Sam to talk architecture, jelly molds and states of matter.
Trifle, blancmange, champagne, and jelly. Order of preference?
Jelly, champagne, trifle, blancmange. I actually find blancmange a little bit creepy. The milk in blancmange is not as predictable. Jelly, I’ve nailed––I know it’s going to melt in someone’s mouth when they put it in there.
Do you even eat jelly anymore, or have you turned a childhood pleasure into a work-related chore?
No, we eat it all the time! Apart from anything else, it’s what we have a lot of around the studio. When you’re a bit peckish, it’s jelly time.
The Ziggurat is a building as much as a piece of food. As people enter and walk through, they’ll contribute to their five-a-day. Just going through the space, you’ll get one of the five through your lungs and eyeballs.
It’s like a benevolent, health-giving twin of what you did with the walk-in gin and tonic.
It’s what we would do with the walk-in gin and tonic if we had a budget for it. But while the walk-in gin and tonic took something that was liquid and turned it into a gas, this is taking something that is solid and turning it into a gas—a further state of matter away from the original ingredients.
You’ve done The Gherkin; you’ve done the Empire State. What’s next? The Burj?
The interesting thing at the moment is, one of the very first jellies we made is based on the top of a Hawksmoor church––St George’s in Bloomsbury, London. The steeple we took it from was actually based on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the world, and that’s actually come full circle. The Ziggurat is exactly that, scaled up to the size of a building—it’s bigger than the actual steeple that we based the original jelly on and there’s also a fruit cloud.
We the public need interesting jelly molds—tell us what to look for, and how to make our own.
Buy them off eBay. Don’t buy any ceramic or glass as they’re a complete pain to use. Get any plastics or, if you can afford it, copper. Or, you could go to your local modeling shop and ask for some food-safe silicon and just cast it around whatever you want––but make sure it’s stepped in towards the top and that there are no undercuts.