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APRICOT CHARLOTTE (another way)
Butter an ordinary pie-dish. Put at the bottom a layer of bread-crumbs about a quarter of an inch thick, and then a layer of hot apricot marmalade, and repeat until the dish is full. Lay two or three pieces of butter on the top, and pour a cupful of cold water over the whole. Bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, half an hour. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain layered pudding of crumbs and jam, baked rather than moulded. Two things decide whether it comes out well: the kind of crumbs and the kind of apricot preserve.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F / 175C. Half an hour is enough to set the layers and brown the buttered top; the filling is already cooked preserve, so much of the time is simply heating through.
- Apricot marmaladeVictorian "marmalade" means a thick fruit pulp preserve, not the citrus kind. Use a good apricot jam or, better, apricot conserve thinned with a spoonful of water and warmed until it pours; anything too stiff will not spread into an even layer.
- BreadcrumbsFresh soft crumbs from a day-old white loaf, not dried packet crumbs, which stay gritty. The recipe gives no quantity; enough for quarter-inch layers alternating with jam until the dish is full.
- The cupful of waterThis is what keeps the pudding from baking dry, and it is easy to misjudge. "Cupful" was not a standard measure in British books of the period; take it as somewhere around 8-10 fl oz (240-280 ml), and pour it slowly around the edge so the top layer is not washed off the jam.
- Start and finish with crumbsStart with crumbs -- The recipe begins with crumbs and, repeated as written, would finish with jam. Ending with a crumb layer instead is an editorial suggestion, so that the butter has something to soak into and brown.
- Butter on topTwo or three pieces means roughly 1 oz (30 g) in small flakes, distributed rather than dropped in one place.
- Dish and yieldAn ordinary pie-dish of the period would hold perhaps 1.5-2 pints (850-1150 ml). Six servings by the standards of the period; four is a more likely modern portion. Serve warm with cream or custard.
Charlottes fall into two families: the moulded, chilled kind lined with sponge fingers, and the older baked kind built from buttered bread and fruit, of which apple charlotte is the ancestor. This version belongs firmly to the second, and it is the thriftiest form of it — crumbs standing in for the sliced and buttered bread, jam standing in for stewed fresh fruit. Cassell's prints it as "another way", signalling a variant of the recipe before it; it needs no fresh apricots, a luxury in a British kitchen for most of the year, and turns a pudding out of stale bread at almost no cost. The name is generally traced to Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented.