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Chocolate Charlotte
1/4 box of gelatine, or 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine, 1/4 cup cold water, 1 ounce Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 6 lady fingers, 1/4 cup granulated sugar, 1 cup hot milk, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1 cup heavy cream, Whites 2 eggs, Few grains salt.
Soak gelatine in cold water and dissolve in scalded milk. Melt chocolate and add granulated sugar. Combine mixtures and strain into bowl. Set in pan of ice-water, and stir constantly until mixture begins to thicken; then add cream mixed with powdered sugar and salt and beaten until stiff, and whites of eggs, beaten until stiff. Turn into a charlotte mould lined with lady fingers, and chill thoroughly.
A cold gelatine charlotte from a chocolate manufacturer's promotional booklet. The structure is sound but the finishing step folds in raw egg whites that never see heat, and the notes below explain the terms as well as the problem.
- The raw whites are the failure pointThe milk is scalded and the gelatine dissolved in it, but the two egg whites are beaten stiff and folded into a mixture that has already been cooled over ice-water. Nothing in the method brings them above room temperature, and the finished charlotte is then chilled and served cold, so the whites are eaten raw.
- Why that matters nowSalmonella can be present inside an intact shell egg, not merely on the shell, and a whipped-in raw white distributed through a chilled dessert offers no kill step at any point. The gelatine sets the mixture; it does not pasteurise it. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- The cream is not the issueWhipped heavy cream folded into a cold charlotte is ordinary practice and needs no comment. Only the uncooked whites take this recipe out of range.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, roughly what a supermarket sells as unsweetened baking chocolate. One ounce is a single square in most modern packaging.
- A quarter box of gelatineBoxes of the period were commonly reckoned in quarters, which is roughly what the recipe's gloss of one tablespoon of granulated gelatine reflects. A modern quarter-ounce envelope is a little less than a tablespoon and is generally rated to set about two cups of liquid.
- Two kinds of sugarGranulated sugar goes into the melted chocolate, where the heat dissolves it; powdered sugar sweetens the cream, because it dissolves without heat.
- The charlotte mouldA plain straight-sided tin or a charlotte mould, lined with the lady fingers. The recipe asks only that it be chilled thoroughly before unmoulding.
Choice Recipes was issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, one of the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, and it gathered contributions from the best-known cooking-school teachers of the day, among them Maria Parloa, Sarah Tyson Rorer and Fannie Merritt Farmer. The precise quarter-cups and the ice-water bath suggest what is often taken to be the house style of the Boston Cooking School, where a charlotte meant a moulded cream stiffened with gelatine and walled in with lady fingers. The form is generally traced to the French charlotte russe associated with Antonin Carême in the early nineteenth century; by 1900 it had become a standard American company dessert, and a chocolate version was exactly the sort of thing a chocolate manufacturer wanted in the hands of home cooks.