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Mrs. Armstrong's Chocolate Charlotte
Soak a quarter of a package of gelatine in one-fourth of a cupful of cold water. Whip one pint of cream to a froth and put it in a bowl, which should be placed in a pan of ice-water. Put an ounce of Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate in a small pan with two tablespoonfuls of sugar and one of boiling water, and stir over the hot fire until smooth and glossy. Add to this a gill of hot milk and the soaked gelatine, and stir until the gelatine is dissolved. Sprinkle a generous half cupful of powdered sugar over the cream. Now add the chocolate and gelatine mixture and stir gently until it begins to thicken. Line a quart charlotte mould with lady fingers, and when the cream is so thick that it will just pour, turn it gently into the mould. Place the charlotte in a cold place for an hour or more, and at serving time turn out on a flat dish.--Mrs. Helen Armstrong.
A proper charlotte: a quart mould lined with lady fingers and filled with chocolate cream set with gelatine. One sentence in the middle -- "when the cream is so thick that it will just pour" -- is the entire difficulty.
- That one sentence is the recipeTurn the cream into the mould too early and it runs down between the lady fingers and pools under them; too late and it will not pour at all, and you are packing a set cream into a lined mould with a spoon. Stir gently and keep testing: you want it thick enough to move slowly off the spoon in a mass.
- Cool the chocolate mixture firstThe chocolate, sugar, hot milk and dissolved gelatine come off a hot fire. Added straight to cream that is sitting over ice-water, the gelatine can seize into threads. Let it fall to barely warm, then add it to the cream in a thin stream while stirring.
- The gelatine quantity is ambiguous"A quarter of a package" depended on whose gelatine you bought, and package sizes varied. For a quart mould set with a pint of whipped cream, something in the region of a scant tablespoon of modern powdered gelatine is the sensible reading, but the original does not tell you.
- A gillHalf a cup, so a gill of hot milk in the charlotte is 4 fluid ounces.
- Lining the mouldTrim the lady fingers flat at one end, stand them upright and close-packed around the inside, and cut a disc for the base. Shop savoiardi work well and should go in dry -- there is no soaking step here, and the cream supplies all the moisture they need.
- No raw egg in this oneWorth saying, because the two other charlottes in this book are a different matter. This is cream, gelatine, sugar, milk and chocolate, with no eggs at all, so it carries none of the raw-white problem flagged on the Cocoa Charlotte and Chocolate Charlotte pages.
- An hour is optimistic"An hour or more" will not reliably set a quart mould through. Give it four hours, or overnight, and dip the mould briefly in warm water before turning it out on the flat dish the recipe asks for.
- A later printing re-proportions itThe 1924 reprint uses half an envelope of gelatine, an ounce and a half of chocolate and three-quarters of a cup of powdered sugar -- a firmer, sweeter, more chocolate-forward version of the same dessert.
The charlotte was the showpiece of the turn-of-the-century dessert table, and this is the classic form: the charlotte russe that Antonin Carême is credited with shaping early in the nineteenth century, a mould lined with sponge fingers and filled with a set cream. What made it a domestic dish rather than a professional one was commercially granulated gelatine, which replaced the long business of boiling down calves' feet and put a turned-out mould within reach of an ordinary kitchen. This booklet carries three charlottes in all -- this one, the Chocolate Charlotte near the front, and Mabel Richards Dulon's Cocoa Charlotte, which is not lined at all and borrows the name. Mrs. Helen Armstrong, who contributes this one, was a cooking-demonstration lecturer; a quart charlotte turned out whole on a flat dish is exactly the sort of thing that plays to a hall.