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RUSSIAN CHARLOTTE (another way)
Take some biscuits a la cuillere. These are made the same as sponge biscuits, but, instead of being baked in frames or in a form, they are made into thin cakes about two inches wide and four or five long; they are then baked on wafer-paper, the top being glazed with sugar sifted through a tamis. They should be baked in a very moderate oven. Line a form at the sides and bottom with them, placing them so close together that no space remains between; fill the centre with a whipped cream or a fromage; turn the charlotte out into a dish, and send at once to table. It should not be kept long unless on ice.
A charlotte russe in its original form: ladyfingers standing shoulder to shoulder around a mould, filled with something cold and set. The recipe assumes you already know how to make the two components, so most of the work is in the assembly.
- Biscuits à la cuillèreThese are ladyfingers — sponge batter shaped with a spoon (or, later, piped) rather than baked in a frame or form. Shop-bought savoiardi work, though they are drier and firmer than a fresh-made biscuit and will soften considerably against the cream.
- Wafer-paperEdible rice or potato-starch paper, used before parchment was common in kitchens. Baking parchment or a silicone mat does the same job; wafer paper is still sold for cake decorating if you want the period effect.
- TamisA drum sieve of fine woven hair or wire. Any fine-mesh sieve will dust sugar over piped batter evenly enough.
- A very moderate ovenAround 300-325F for ladyfingers. They should dry and set pale gold rather than colour; a hot oven cracks the sugar crust and dries the crumb to dust.
- FromageNot cheese. In nineteenth-century French kitchen usage a fromage is a moulded cream set with isinglass or gelatine — what we would call a bavarois. If the filling is a plain whipped cream it will not hold a turned-out shape, so a set cream is the safer reading of the instruction.
- Lining the mouldThe hinge of the dish. Trim the biscuits to the exact height of the mould and butt them tight, sugared side outward against the tin; any gap lets the filling bulge through and the charlotte collapses when unmoulded. Cut a disc or a rosette of trimmed biscuits for the base.
- Setting and turning outA gelatine-set filling needs at least four hours chilled, preferably overnight, before it will release cleanly. Dip the mould a few seconds in warm water and invert onto the serving dish.
- "Not kept long unless on ice"A dairy filling with no preservative and no cooking after assembly. Refrigerate until the moment of serving and treat it as a same-day dish.
- YieldA charlotte built in a mould of about six inches across serves six to eight; at the two-inch width the recipe specifies, that is roughly ten to twelve biscuits for the sides, plus trimmings for the base.
The charlotte russe is generally credited to Marie-Antoine Carême, who is said to have devised it in the early nineteenth century as a cold variation on the older baked apple charlotte — bread-lined and hot — and to have named it for a Russian patron or the Russian court, accounts differ. What separates the two is the swap of buttered bread for ladyfingers and of stewed fruit for a bavarian cream, which makes the dish a piece of confectionery rather than a pudding. That the Cassell's editors give it as "another way," and describe the biscuits at more length than the filling, suggests where the difficulty is likely to have lain for a Victorian household cook: whipped cream was easy, but piping and baking a tray of even ladyfingers was a professional skill. By the late nineteenth century the charlotte russe had become a standard of the British and American dinner table, and in New York it survived well into the twentieth century as a street-corner cup of sponge and whipped cream.