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Charlotte Russe (One pint of sweet cream)
One pint of sweet cream, sweeten and flavor to taste; one and one half ounces of Cox's gelatine, whites of three eggs; soak the gelatine in one cup of cold water, then add one cup of hot milk, when all dissolved, strain. Line your mould with lady fingers and pour in the mixture.
This is a classic uncooked charlotte russe, and the problem is structural rather than a matter of technique: the egg whites are never heated at any point, and nothing in the method brings them near a safe temperature.
- Raw egg whitesThe three whites are beaten in and set with gelatine; the only heat in the recipe is one cup of hot milk, which is diluted into a pint of cold cream and cannot pasteurise anything. Salmonella in shell eggs remains a real risk, and a chilled, sweet, high-moisture dessert held for hours is a hospitable medium. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue base should be used instead.
- Cox's gelatineCox's was a Scottish gelatine brand, sold by weight rather than in standardised sachets. Its setting strength cannot be assumed to match a modern granulated product, so an ounce and a half here should not be substituted measure-for-measure; done blind, the result is likely to be rubbery.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream that was the ordinary state of milk left standing in a nineteenth-century kitchen. It does not mean sweetened; the sugar is added separately.
- Lady fingersThese were a piped sponge biscuit, baked dry and firm rather than the soft, damp sponge fingers now sold in some bakeries. A biscuit sturdy enough to stand against the mould and take up liquid without collapsing is what the method requires.
- "Flavor to taste"The recipe does not specify. Vanilla, sherry or rose water would all be unremarkable choices in a book of this period.
- YieldA pint of cream with a cup of milk and a cup of water fills a large mould; the recipe gives no yield. The proportion of gelatine to liquid points to a firm, sliceable set rather than a spoonable cream.
Charlotte russe is generally credited to the French chef Marie-Antoine Carême, who is said to have adapted the older English apple charlotte — a hot pudding lined with buttered bread — into a cold one lined with ladyfingers and filled with Bavarian cream, naming it for his Russian patron. By the second half of the nineteenth century it had become a standard company dessert of the American middle-class household, and it appears in domestic manuals of the period, often in abbreviated form. Its popularity owed much to the commercial availability of packaged gelatine, which replaced the day-long labour of boiling calves' feet and put moulded cold desserts within reach of a kitchen without a staff.