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Gooseberry Charlotte
Pick the tops and stalks from a pound and a half of gooseberries; wash and drain them, and boil them with a pound and a half of loaf sugar, until reduced to a pulp. Press them through a coarse sieve. Take half a dozen sponge-biscuits, cut them into thin slices, and line a plain round mould with them. Pour in the fruit, cover it with slices of spongecake, place a cover and a weight on the top, and let it remain until well set. Turn it out before serving, and pour some good custard or nicely-flavoured cream round it. Thin slices of bread may be used instead of sponge-biscuit. Time, ten or twelve hours to set properly. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A cold moulded charlotte that relies on nothing but fruit pectin and sugar to set — no gelatine, no baking. The whole thing stands or falls on how far you reduce the gooseberries.
- Reduce the fruit further than feels rightThe pulp has to be thick enough to hold a shape when cold, since there is no gelatine. Cook it down until a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a track that closes only slowly; a loose purée will soak the sponge and collapse when turned out.
- GooseberriesHard green cooking gooseberries, not the sweet dessert varieties, and not cape gooseberries (physalis), which are unrelated. Frozen work perfectly well here as they are being cooked to a pulp anyway. A pound and a half is about 680 g.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a solid cone or loaf, broken up for use — ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent. The quantity is equal to the fruit by weight, which is jam proportions and part of what makes the pulp set; reducing it will give a looser, tarter charlotte.
- Sponge-biscuitsMost likely what a British cook now calls sponge fingers or boudoir biscuits, and an American cook calls ladyfingers, though the instruction to cut them into thin slices may point to small sponge cakes. Six is a modest number; buy a full packet and cut them to fit, trimming wedges for the base of the mould so there are no gaps.
- The mouldA plain round mould means a straight-sided or slightly tapered charlotte mould, big enough to take all the pulp with the lining in place. A deep cake tin or a pudding basin lined with cling film will turn out more reliably.
- Weight and settingAny flat plate that sits inside the rim, with a tin of beans on top, gives enough pressure. Ten to twelve hours is right, but set it in the refrigerator rather than a cold larder — a sweetened fruit pulp left overnight at room temperature is asking for trouble.
- Turning outRun a thin knife round the edge, invert onto a serving dish and lift the mould straight up. If it sticks, a cloth wrung out in hot water laid over the mould for a few seconds will release it.
- To serveA pouring custard — crème anglaise — or lightly whipped cream flavoured with a little vanilla or lemon. Serves five or six, and the acidity of the fruit means it wants a generous amount of the cream around it.
The charlotte in this form — a mould lined with bread or sponge, filled with cooked fruit and pressed until set — is the older of the two dishes to carry the name, and by the nineteenth century it was firmly domestic English cookery, the apple version being much the best known. The chilled cream-filled charlotte russe, generally credited to Carême, is its more fashionable relative; this gooseberry one belongs squarely to the kitchen garden, made in the short early-summer window when hard green gooseberries are on the bush and there is more fruit than anyone knows what to do with. The alternative of plain bread slices, offered almost as an afterthought, tells you what the dish really is: a thrifty way of using stale bread and a glut of sour fruit, dressed up with a mould and a jug of custard. The stated cost is 1s. 3d.<br><br>Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery arranged thousands of such entries alphabetically, and its habit of giving a time, a number of servings and a probable cost for each was presumably aimed at readers running a middle-class household, though how far such figures were actually used in budgeting is harder to say.