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Charlotte Russe (Sweeten one quart cream flavor)
Sweeten one quart cream, flavor it with wine and whip it lightly. Dissolve half a box gelatine in a tablespoonful cold water and the same quantity of boiling water. Set over the steam of a kettle to dissolve. Then add half a pint of cream. When cold, stir it into the whipped cream. Beat the whites of four eggs very light, and stir into the cream. When it begins to stiffen, pour into a glass bowl, lined with thin strips of sponge cake. Whip, sweeten and flavor another pint of cream, and garnish the dish.--Mrs. D. Charlotte Russe.
One ounce gelatine; one quart rich cream; eight eggs; one quart new milk. Sugar and flavoring to taste. Whip the cream to a stiff froth. Make a custard of the milk, gelatine and yolks of the eggs. When cool, add the whites of the eggs well beaten and the whipped cream. Line the mould with sponge cake, and if in summer put it on ice.--Miss M. C. L.
Two versions from two contributors sit side by side here, and both finish with raw, unheated egg white folded into cream that is then only chilled. That is the reason this page is for reading rather than cooking.
- Raw egg white, never heatedIn Mrs. D.'s version nothing in the bowl is ever cooked: the whites of four eggs are beaten and stirred straight into sweetened cream and set with gelatine. Miss M. C. L.'s version cooks a custard with the yolks, then adds the raw whites after it has cooled. Raw shell egg carries a Salmonella risk that chilling does not reduce, and a molded cream sitting at cellar temperature or on ice for hours is a good environment for growth rather than a bad one.
- "If in summer put it on ice"This is the period's whole plan for food safety, and it is not equivalent to refrigeration. A large mold of cream and egg cooling slowly in an ice chest spends a long time in the range where bacteria multiply. If you want a charlotte russe, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg product or a cooked base.
- Half a box of gelatineNineteenth-century gelatine boxes appear to have held roughly an ounce, so "half a box" is probably about a half ounce, or two modern envelopes; the second recipe on this page calls for a full ounce, which is consistent with that reading. The quantity is genuinely ambiguous, and it is being asked to set two and a half pints of aerated cream on two tablespoons of water, which is far less liquid than modern granulated gelatine needs to bloom properly.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh whole milk, straight from the animal and unskimmed. In 1879 Virginia it would also have been unpasteurized, which is a second reason the raw additions in these recipes were riskier than the writers understood.
- Wine as the flavoringThe recipe specifies only "wine." A sweet fortified wine such as sherry or madeira is a plausible reading for a Virginia household of this date, but nothing on the page identifies which wine was intended.
- Sponge cake liningBoth versions line the vessel rather than baking anything: thin strips of sponge cake stood around a glass bowl or a mold.
- ScaleA quart of cream in the first recipe plus another pint whipped for garnish, or a quart of cream and a quart of milk in the second, indicates a party dish for a dozen or more people, not a family dessert.
Charlotte russe is generally credited to Marie-Antoine Carême, who is said to have adapted the older English apple charlotte by lining the mold with ladyfingers or sponge and filling it with bavarian cream, naming it for a Russian patron or tsar. By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled in 1879 the dish had become standard American company fare, and Marion Cabell Tyree's method of printing several contributors' versions one after another, each signed with initials, suggests something of how such a recipe circulated among hostesses, with the proportions of cream, gelatine and egg shifting from one version to the next. The reliance on quarts of cream also marks it as a dish for a household with its own dairy.