Home › The Principles of Cookery › Charlotte
Charlotte
A Charlotte, or French fruit pudding, may be made of almost every kind of fruit, or of two or three kinds together. Take a plain round mould, butter it well, and line the bottom and sides completely with strips of the crumb of bread well buttered, making each piece fold over another, so as to make a complete wall of bread. Fill up the dish with any sort of stewed, fresh, or preserved fruit, taking care to have it sufficiently moist to soak the bread a little. Cover the top with slices of buttered bread. Put a plate and a weight over the pudding, and bake it in a quick oven. Turn it out in a shape, and serve with sifted sugar and cream. Time to bake, ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. for a mould. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A bread-lined fruit mould of the sort that stood in for pastry in a Victorian kitchen. Two things in the original need attention: the moisture of the filling and the wildly short baking time.
- The hinge: a dry, tight bread wallThe strips must overlap firmly and be buttered on both faces, or juice escapes at the seams and the charlotte collapses when turned out. Butter the mould generously as well; the bread should fry against the metal rather than steam.
- Ten minutes is not enoughA quick oven is usually reckoned to be somewhere around 400F. A filled charlotte is likely to need considerably longer than ten minutes -- perhaps 30 to 40 minutes -- for the crust to colour and set and the fruit to bind; ten would risk a pale, soggy case. The instruction may be a slip, or may assume the fruit went in already hot from the stewpan.
- Stew the fruit first, and stew it dryApples, plums or apricots should be cooked down with sugar until thick and just spreadable, not swimming. "Sufficiently moist to soak the bread a little" is the whole margin: too wet and the wall dissolves, too dry and the crumb stays hard.
- Crumb of breadThis means the interior of a close-textured white loaf with the crust cut away, sliced about a quarter-inch thick. Ordinary soft sandwich bread is too airy; a day-old plain white loaf or brioche behaves better.
- The plate and weightThey compress the filling so the pudding holds its shape. Use an ovenproof saucer and something heat-safe, and remove both for the last ten minutes so the top browns.
- Turning outLet it stand 10 to 15 minutes off the heat before inverting. Straight from the oven the fruit is molten and will run; fully cold and the butter sets and the bread sticks.
- Cost and mould"1s. for a mould" is one shilling for the quantity that fills a mould, not the price of the tin. Any plain charlotte tin, deep cake tin or 1.5-pint pudding basin with straight-ish sides will do.
- YieldFour or five, as stated. Serve with sifted sugar and pouring cream, as directed, or with a plain custard.
The name is generally traced to Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, though the connection is traditional rather than documented, and the English apple charlotte was well established by the early nineteenth century as a way of making a substantial sweet dish without pastry — bread and butter did the structural work that a crust otherwise would. It should not be confused with the charlotte russe, the cold moulded cream in a wall of sponge fingers associated with Antonin Carême, which took the older name for a quite different construction. What the entry describes is essentially a method: any stewed or preserved fruit in the house can be turned into a hot pudding, which is the sort of economy a late-Victorian household manual existed to teach.