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Charlotte Russe
1 quart of good cream 3/4 cup of powdered sugar 1 teaspoonful of vanilla 1/2 pound of lady fingers 1/2 box of gelatine 1½ gill sherry (if you use wine) Cover the gelatine with cold water, and let it soak for a half hour. Whip the cream and lay it on a sieve to drain. Line two plain two-quart moulds with the lady fingers. Now turn the cream into a large basin and place it in a pan of cracked ice: add to the soaked gelatine just enough boiling water to dissolve it. Now add the sugar carefully to the cream, then the vanilla and wine, and last, strain in the gelatine. Commence to stir immediately; stir from the sides and bottom of the basin until it begins to thicken, then pour into the moulds and stand away on the ice to harden.
A no-bake gelatine cream set in a lady-finger shell, written for a kitchen with an icebox rather than a refrigerator. The whole recipe turns on temperature control at one moment.
- The hinge: gelatine temperatureDissolved gelatine hitting ice-cold whipped cream sets on contact and leaves rubbery threads through the mixture. Let the dissolved gelatine cool until it is barely warm to the finger, pour it into the cream in a thin stream while stirring, and keep stirring from the sides and bottom as directed until the whole thing thickens evenly.
- "Half a box" of gelatineThis is genuinely ambiguous. Gelatine was sold in boxes of varying size, and period cookbooks are inconsistent about what a box held; the author does not say. Depending on the reading, half a box could be anywhere from about 1/2 oz to about 1 oz. For a quart of cream plus sherry, something in the region of 1/2 oz -- two modern quarter-ounce envelopes, about 1 1/2 level tablespoons -- is a sensible starting point.
- Gills and sherryA gill is half a cup, so 1½ gills is 3/4 cup of sherry. That is a substantial amount of liquid in a set cream; if you leave the wine out, as the recipe allows, the mixture will be firmer and you can reduce the gelatine slightly.
- Draining the whipped creamCream whipped by hand from unhomogenised cream threw off a good deal of liquid, hence the sieve. Modern heavy cream whipped to soft peaks in a mixer sheds very little, and draining can generally be skipped; whip only to soft peaks, since stiff cream will not fold smoothly with the gelatine.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than today's confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either works here; superfine sugar dissolves fastest in cold cream.
- The mouldsTwo plain two-quart moulds means straight-sided charlotte moulds or deep bowls. Line the sides with lady fingers standing upright, rounded sides out, trimmed flat at the top, and cover the base as well; a strip of parchment in the bottom makes unmoulding cleaner.
- Chilling and unmoulding"Stand away on the ice" is a refrigerator, 4 to 6 hours or overnight. To turn out, dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a plate; do not let it stand in warm water, or the outer layer slumps.
- YieldTwo two-quart moulds is a great deal of dessert — 16 to 20 servings. Halving the recipe into a single mould is more realistic for a modern table.
The charlotte russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême, who is said to have adapted the older English baked charlotte — fruit in a case of buttered bread — into a cold version lined with lady fingers, and to have named it for the Russian court he served; rival accounts hold that the dish was first a charlotte à la parisienne and only later renamed. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become a standard of American cookbooks and confectioners' shops, sold in New York bakeries as a single portion of sponge and whipped cream in a paper collar. Its place in a book of hot weather dishes is straightforward: nothing here needs an oven, and a household with a reliable supply of ice could produce an impressive dessert without heating the kitchen. The reliance on ice, and on gelatine sold by the box rather than the sheet, suggests roughly when the recipe belongs.