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CHARLOTTE RUSSE (another way)
Line a plain round mould with French biscuit of different colours. Divide the mould into four compartments by placing inside pieces of biscuit the height of the mould perpendicularly. These must of course be placed across both ways. Fill each division with a different puree of fruit, cover it closely with biscuit, and bake in a good oven. Turn it out of the mould, and serve with a little custard. Time to bake, half an hour. The probable cost will depend upon the fruit with which it is filled. Sufficient, one pint mould for four persons.
A baked charlotte rather than the familiar chilled one: the mould is lined with sponge biscuits, packed with fruit purée in four quarters, and put in the oven. Nothing here is dangerous, but several of the terms and the success of the turn-out depend on details the original leaves unsaid.
- French biscuitThese are dry finger biscuits — savoiardi or ladyfingers — not a soft cake. "Of different colours" most likely means tinted or variously flavoured batches; plain ones work the same way and only the stripes are lost.
- A good ovenProbably a moderate to fairly hot oven, somewhere around 350–375F. Hotter and the exposed biscuit edges risk scorching before the fruit is heated through; the half-hour stated is consistent with that range.
- The purée must be thickThis is the hinge. A loose, watery fruit purée will soak the biscuit lining to pulp and the charlotte will collapse when turned out. Cook the fruit down until a spoon drawn through leaves a channel, and sweeten to taste before it goes in.
- The dividersTwo upright pieces of biscuit set across each other at right angles make the four compartments. Cut them to the exact height of the mould so the lid of biscuit sits flat on them and holds everything in place under the fruit's pressure.
- Pint mouldAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about two and a half US cups — a small charlotte mould or a straight-sided one-pint pudding basin. The stated yield of four is modest portions.
- Turning outLet it stand five to ten minutes off the heat before inverting. Straight from the oven the purée is fluid and will run when the mould lifts; fully cold, the biscuit sticks.
- The custardA pouring custard — crème anglaise, egg yolks, sugar and milk or cream, cooked to a coating consistency and not boiled. Serve it round the base rather than over the top so the biscuit stays crisp.
- The cost line"Probable cost will depend upon the fruit" is a period convention: the book normally gave a cost figure for household budgeting, and any figure here would have been meaningless with fruit at market prices.
The Charlotte Russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême, who is said to have named the cold version — a mould lined with sponge fingers and filled with Bavarian cream — in honour of the Russian court he cooked for. What Cassell's gives here is closer to the older English apple charlotte, a bread- or biscuit-lined mould of cooked fruit baked and turned out, and the book has simply borrowed the fashionable French name for it. The four-compartment construction is showmanship of a kind Victorian household cookery inherited from the professional confectioner: four fruits of contrasting colour, revealed only when the pudding is cut. That such a trick appears in a general household dictionary rather than a pastry manual says something about how far restaurant presentation had travelled into the middle-class dining room by the 1870s.