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Charlotte Russe (Lady fingers or stale sponge)
Lady fingers or stale sponge cake 2 cups cream ⅜ cup sugar Flavoring to taste 1 teaspoon powdered gelatine ⅓ 1/3 cup cold water or milk.
Note-Instead of gelatine above given, 1 ounce of sheet gelatine may be used.
Line a mould or dish holding about 6 cups with strips of the cake; the side next to the dish will be the outside when served. Trim the cake to fit the dish.
The lady fingers may be stuck together with white of egg or dissolved gelatine.
Put the gelatine to soak in cold water or milk. Whip the cream, beat in the sugar and flavor. Stand the gelatine over hot water and dissolve it. Then rapidly mix it with the whipped cream and pour into the cake-lined dish. Set away to cool before serving. This recipe came from MacDonald Institute.
A cold-set cream in a cake case, and one of the few desserts in this chapter that never sees the oven. The whole thing hinges on the temperature of the gelatine when it meets the cream.
- The gelatine is the hingeDissolved gelatine straight off the hot water will seize into threads the instant it hits cold whipped cream. Let it cool until it is barely warm to the finger, then stir a spoonful of the whipped cream into it first and return that mixture to the bowl, working quickly.
- The two gelatine quantities do not matchOne teaspoon of powdered gelatine is only a light set, and an ounce of sheet gelatine is several times that much, which would give a rubbery result. Period sheet gelatine was sold in thin leaves whose weight is hard to translate, so the ounce is not a figure to trust. Work from the teaspoon of powder, or about two modern leaves; the gelatine here is only supporting whipped cream, not setting a liquid.
- Measures⅜ cup of sugar is 6 tablespoons. The mould "holding about 6 cups" is a 1.5 litre charlotte mould, souffle dish or loaf tin.
- The cream"Cream" here means what is now sold as heavy or whipping cream, at 35 percent fat. Anything lighter will not hold. Whip to soft peaks only — the gelatine will firm it further, and over-whipped cream turns grainy when folded.
- Raw egg white as glueThe white of egg for sticking the lady fingers together is uncooked and stays that way. Use the dissolved gelatine instead, which the recipe already offers and which holds better.
- Stale cake is deliberateFresh sponge slumps and goes sodden against the cream. Day-old lady fingers or sponge keep their edges and absorb a little moisture without collapsing.
- Chilling time"Set away to cool" means several hours in the refrigerator — allow four, or overnight. Unmould by dipping the dish briefly in warm water.
- The stray line at the end"2 eggs ¾ cup sugar" appears to be the opening of the next recipe on the page and has no part in this one. Ignore it.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a 6-cup mould.
Charlotte russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême, who is said to have adapted the older baked English charlotte — bread-lined and filled with stewed fruit — into a cold version lined with biscuits and filled with bavarian cream, the "russe" a nod to the Russian court he cooked for. By the time this book appeared it had become a fixture of North American domestic-science teaching: showy enough for a supper table, but built from three cheap components and requiring no oven at the final stage. The attribution to MacDonald Institute is worth noting — that was the household science school at Guelph, Ontario, opened in the early 1900s with money from the tobacco magnate Sir William Macdonald, and its graduates trained a generation of Canadian teachers. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by a flour milling company, leaned on such institutional recipes for authority in exactly the way a modern brand leans on a test kitchen.