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Maple Charlotte
Soak 1 tablespoon gelatin in 2 tablespoons cold water. Boil 2/3 cup maple syrup until it spins a thread. Add gelatin and stir until dissolved. Pour slowly onto 2 egg whites, beaten stiff. Put in a cool place and when it begins to stiffen fold in 2/3 cup heavy cream beaten stiff. Add 1/2 cup pecan nut meats broken in pieces. Fill center of sponge cake box with charlotte mixture and serve with maple pecan sauce.
A gelatin-set maple meringue folded with whipped cream — essentially a Bavarian cream in the charlotte manner. The whole thing hinges on temperature: too hot at the wrong moment and it liquefies, too cold and the cream will not fold in.
- "Spins a thread"This is the thread stage, about 230-234F on a candy thermometer. Boil the syrup in a small heavy pan, and expect it to reduce noticeably; under-boiled syrup gives a slacker, wetter mixture.
- GelatinA tablespoon of granulated gelatin is roughly one standard envelope (1/4 oz / 7 g is nearer 2 1/4 teaspoons, so a tablespoon is a little more). Let it stand in the cold water until it swells to a solid rubbery block, five minutes or so, before the hot syrup goes in.
- Pouring onto the whitesAdd the syrup in a thin stream at the edge of the bowl with the mixer running, as for Italian meringue. Poured in a lump onto stiff whites it cooks a scrambled patch and deflates the rest.
- Egg safetyHot syrup at thread stage warms the whites but does not reliably pasteurize them, and the sweet is never cooked further. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized egg whites.
- "A cool place"The refrigerator. Watch it rather than timing it: you want the consistency of unbeaten egg white, thickened but still pourable, usually 20-40 minutes. Fully set, it will break into lumps when you fold in the cream.
- "Sponge cake box"A sponge cake baked in a square or loaf tin, the top cut off and the crumb hollowed out to leave a case with walls about half an inch thick. A store-bought sponge loaf or a ring of ladyfingers in a mould does the same job.
- The sauceNo recipe is given here. A workable reconstruction is maple syrup warmed with a spoonful of butter and a handful of chopped pecans; a little cream stirred in keeps it from setting hard on the plate.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest enough filling for a small loaf-sized cake case, perhaps six servings. It is very sweet, so cut modest portions and chill until the moment of serving.
The charlotte family runs from the baked apple charlotte of eighteenth-century England to the charlotte russe of nineteenth-century French pastry — a mould lined with cake or ladyfingers and filled with a cold, gelatin-lightened cream. By the early twentieth century American cookbooks had loosened the term further: whipped-cream-and-gelatin fillings in a cake shell were commonly called charlottes, and the moulded liner might be simply a hollowed sponge loaf, as here. Maple syrup was a distinctively American sweetener in such desserts, and pairing it with pecans gave a confection that read as domestic rather than continental. A cold sweet of this kind had the practical advantage of being assembled hours ahead and turned out at the table.