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Apple Charlotte
Pare, core, and slice three pounds of good cooking apples, and stew them gently to a pulp, with a little sugar and the thinly-chopped rind of two lemons. Well butter a mould, and place at the bottom and round it thin slices of stale bread dipped in melted butter, and fill with the apple. Let the pieces of bread overlap each other, or the apple will escape. Lay a thin slice of bread the shape of the mould over the top, cover it with a plate, and place a weight on it, and bake in a quick oven. Turn it out, and serve hot, with sifted sugar. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a pint mould.
A straightforward apple charlotte, but the original assumes a cook who already knows that the filling must be nearly dry and the bread lining watertight. Two details in the text are worth pausing over: the oven and the quantity.
- The hinge: cook the apples down hardStew the fruit until it is a thick, spoon-standing pulp with no free liquid — closer to marmalade than apple sauce. A wet filling steams the bread from the inside and the charlotte collapses when turned out.
- "A quick oven"In Victorian usage roughly 400-450F (200-230C), though the books are not consistent with one another. An hour at that heat is a long time for a pint mould; 400F (200C) for 40-50 minutes will crisp and colour the bread without scorching the edges. Judge by the colour of the crust, not the clock.
- Three pounds of apples, one pint mouldThree pounds of fruit will stew down to considerably more pulp than a pint mould will hold, so either scale the fruit down or use a larger mould. The excess keeps perfectly well as apple sauce.
- Bread and butterStale close-crumbed white bread, crusts removed, cut about 1/4 inch thick. Dip both sides in melted butter and press the overlaps firmly — the book is right that any gap will leak. Allow 4-5 oz butter.
- Lemon rind"Thinly-chopped rind" means zest with no white pith. Two lemons' worth is assertive against 3 lb of apples; scale it with the fruit if you reduce the quantity.
- The weightThe plate and weight consolidate the charlotte so it holds its shape. Remove both for the last 10 minutes so the top lid of bread can brown and dry.
- Turning outRest it 5-10 minutes before inverting, or the still-fluid centre will push the sides apart. Run a thin knife round the mould first.
- Cost and yieldThe shilling is Victorian money, and marks this as plain family cookery rather than dinner-party work. A pint mould might serve three or four.
The charlotte is a British and French dish of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its name generally traced — though without firm documentation — to Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, who was associated with the encouragement of apple growers. Whatever the origin of the word, the construction is the point: a mould lined with buttered bread and packed with fruit is a way of turning stale loaf and windfall apples into a hot pudding, and it belongs to the same thrifty family as bread pudding and summer pudding. Cassell's places it among the fundamentals rather than the fancy work — the more elaborate cold charlotte russe, lined with sponge fingers and filled with Bavarian cream, was the dinner-party version and appears elsewhere in these books. The insistence on stale bread is not fussiness; fresh crumb absorbs butter unevenly and turns to paste under the weight.