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Strawberry Chartreuse
Take a charlotte mould and line it with lemon jelly flavoured with any liqueur; then slice some fine strawberries and cover the jelly with them. Any dried fruit of another colour may be used in addition if liked. Fill the centre with a cream made in the following manner. To each half pint of thick cream allow a quarter of an ounce of gelatine, a gill of lemon jelly, and a quarter of a pound of strawberries cut up and sweetened a little, or soaked in a little maraschino or other liqueur. The whole should be mixed over ice, and then put in the centre of the mould when beginning to set. Set the mould on ice, and turn out when firm. This may also be made by putting the cream round the mould and the fruit in the centre.
An aspic-lined cream mould of the sort that once opened a summer dinner. Nothing here is difficult, but the whole thing depends on building the jelly lining in thin, fully set layers rather than pouring it in all at once.
- The hinge: line the mould in stagesChill the mould, pour in a few tablespoons of liquid jelly, and rotate it in ice water until that film is set before adding more. Set each layer of strawberry slices into a thin coat of nearly-set jelly so the fruit is locked in place; if you flood the mould, the slices float and the pattern collapses.
- Charlotte mouldA plain, straight-sided or slightly tapered tin, usually somewhere between 1 and 2 quarts. Any smooth metal mould, pudding basin or loaf tin will serve, though a metal one unmoulds far more readily than glass or ceramic.
- MeasuresA gill is a quarter of a British pint, 5 fl oz, or about two-thirds of a US cup. Half a pint of cream is 10 fl oz British, about 1¼ US cups. A quarter of an ounce of gelatine is roughly 7 g, or one standard envelope of powdered gelatine; bloom it in cold water first, then dissolve it in the warm gill of lemon jelly rather than adding it dry to cream.
- Lemon jellyThis was made from scratch: gelatine, sugar, water, lemon juice and peel, cleared with egg white. A packet of lemon-flavoured gelatine dessert made at slightly under the stated water gives a firmer, workable substitute, but it will be sweeter and cloudier than the original clear jelly.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or double cream, at least 36% fat. It should be whipped only to soft, floppy peaks before the gelatine mixture goes in; whipped stiff, it will not settle smoothly into the lined mould and will trap air pockets against the jelly.
- "Dried fruit of another colour"Read this as candied or glacé fruit for contrast in the lining: angelica, glacé cherries, thin slices of candied citron. Modern raisins and dried apricots are too opaque and leathery for the purpose.
- Mixing over iceSet the bowl in a larger bowl of ice water and stir until the cream thickens to the point of just holding a ribbon. Too warm and it runs and melts the lining; too cold and it sets in lumps you cannot spread.
- Setting and turning outThe refrigerator replaces the ice bath for the final set; allow four hours, or overnight. To unmould, dip the tin in warm water for five seconds, wipe it dry, and invert onto a chilled plate.
- YieldSix or so servings, depending on the size of the mould, since the quantities are given as a proportion rather than a fixed batch. Serve the day it is made, as gelatine on cut strawberries weeps by the second day.
A chartreuse in classical French cookery was originally a savoury moulded dish, vegetables and forcemeat arranged in bands inside a lined mould, and the name is generally traced to the Carthusian monks and their reputedly meatless table. By the later nineteenth century the term had loosened to mean almost any dish built in decorative layers within a mould, and English cookery books applied it freely to sweet creams set in jelly. The recipe teaches a technique rather than a single dish: the whole grammar of lining a mould with jelly, bedding fruit in it, and filling the centre with a gelatine-set cream. Such things depended on the ice trade and on the household ice-box, and on commercially refined leaf and powdered gelatine, which over the later nineteenth century was increasingly preferred to the days-long business of boiling calves' feet for stock jelly. The instruction to soak the strawberries in maraschino, a sour-cherry liqueur then a fixture of the confectioner's shelf, is of its period, as is the closing suggestion to reverse the arrangement entirely and put the fruit in the middle.