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Blackberry Charlotte Russe
Place stale sponge cake around edges of serving dish, filling centre with berries. Heap whipped cream over the top.
A three-line assembly with everything left to the cook's judgment. The only real decisions are what kind of cake, how the berries are dressed, and when it goes together.
- "Stale sponge cake"Day-old cake, sliced into fingers or strips, stands upright against the side of the dish without slumping. Ladyfingers (savoiardi) are the standard substitute and were common in period charlottes; a stale plain sponge or pound cake cut into 3-inch batons works equally well.
- Line the dish firstSet the cake against the wall of a straight-sided glass bowl or a springform-style mould before any fruit goes in. Once berries and cream are in place the strips cannot be adjusted.
- The berries need sugar and timeThe original says nothing about dressing the fruit. If you want to macerate, toss about 1 quart of blackberries with 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar and let them stand 30 minutes, then drain off most of the juice or the cake wall turns to mush.
- Whipped creamTwo cups of heavy cream whipped to soft peaks, sweetened with 2 to 3 tablespoons sugar. Vanilla or a spoonful of sherry is a plausible flavouring; soft peaks hold their shape heaped without weeping the way stiff-beaten cream does.
- Assemble lateThis is not a make-ahead dessert in the modern sense. An hour in the refrigerator lets the cake absorb a little juice and firm the cream; left much longer it is liable to slump.
- YieldBuilt in a 1 1/2-quart dish, it should serve roughly six.
A charlotte russe is properly a mould lined with sponge fingers and filled with bavarian cream, and the name is generally traced to the French pastry cooks of the early nineteenth century, Marie-Antoine Carême among them, who set it apart from the older baked apple charlotte by calling it "Russian." What appears here is the American parlour version: no gelatine, no custard, no unmoulding, just cake, fruit and whipped cream in a glass dish. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century fruit cookery leaned hard on this kind of uncooked assembly, partly because it showed off summer berries at their brief peak and partly because a household with a stale cake and a cow had the whole dessert already on hand.