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Orange Charlotte
1/3 box gelatine 1/3 cup cold water 1/3 cup boiling water 1 cup sugar 1 cup orange juice and pulp 3 tablespoons lemon juice Whites of 3 eggs Whip from 2 cups cream Soak the gelatine in cold water, dissolve in boiling water; strain and add sugar, lemon juice, orange juice and pulp; chill, and when jelly begins to set add the egg whites beaten very stiff, fold in the cream. Line a mould with sections of oranges, lady fingers or sponge cake, pour the Charlotte into the mould and chill on ice. To remove from mould loosen around the edges with a palette knife, place a dish over the mould and turn quickly upside down. Snow Pudding: Beat the gelatine and whites of eggs separately; let the gelatine stiffen first and then beat in the whites of eggs. Jellies, etc.
A cold gelatine dessert of a kind that filled the pudding chapters of every American cookbook around 1900. The obstacle is structural rather than technical: nothing in it is ever heated to a safe temperature.
- Raw egg whitesThe three whites are beaten stiff and folded into a mixture that has already been chilled, then the whole thing is set on ice and served. Nothing reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and the citrus juice does not make the mixture safe. Chilling slows bacterial growth; it does not undo contamination. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- The boiling water is not a cook stepThe third of a cup of boiling water only dissolves the gelatine, and it is diluted and cooled long before the whites go in. It is easy to read that line as pasteurisation. It is not.
- "1/3 box gelatine"Period boxes of granulated gelatine were not standardised, and conversion tables disagree; a third of a box is usually reckoned at roughly one to one and a half modern 1/4 oz envelopes. Because the strength of the product varied, the set of this quantity in a charlotte of this size is unpredictable by present standards.
- "Whip from 2 cups cream"An instruction from the era of hand whisks, when the cream was whipped and the stiff froth skimmed off as it rose, only that froth being used. Two cups of cream yields distinctly less than two cups of usable whip, which is why the recipe specifies the whip taken from a stated quantity of cream rather than a quantity of whipped cream.
- Orange juice and pulpThe cup is juice plus the broken-up flesh of the segments, not strained juice. Fresh pineapple, kiwi or papaya cannot be substituted — their proteases dissolve gelatine and the mould will never set.
- Snow Pudding noteThe trailing paragraph is a brief method note for a different dish, not part of the charlotte: the gelatine and the whites are beaten separately, the gelatine allowed to stiffen first, and the whites then beaten in. It carries the identical raw-egg problem.
The charlotte russe — a mould lined with sponge fingers and filled with a set cream — is generally traced to the French kitchen of the early nineteenth century and, by tradition, to Antonin Car deleteme