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Strawberry Charlotte Russe
Crush two cups strawberries, add one cup sugar, and add to Vanilla Charlotte Russe No. 1. 8 apples 1/2 glass crab apple jelly ½ cup seeded raisins 2 tablespoons butter
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's Vanilla Charlotte Russe No. 1 in front of you, and it has picked up a stray ingredient list from a neighboring page.
- The trailing ingredients are not part of this dishThe apples, crab apple jelly, raisins and butter belong to another recipe, run together with this one in the original setting; what that recipe was cannot be told from this page. Disregard them.
- What the base recipe isA period Charlotte Russe is a cream set with gelatin, turned into a mold lined with ladyfingers or strips of sponge cake. A vanilla base of this kind would typically call for gelatin softened in cold water, dissolved, sweetened and flavored with vanilla, then folded into whipped cream, but the text of No. 1 is not given here.
- Fold the fruit in coldCrush the berries and stir the sugar in first so it dissolves, then chill the purée before it goes into the cream. Warm fruit will deflate whipped cream and can loosen a gelatin base that has already begun to set.
- Extra liquid means extra gelatinTwo cups of crushed berries plus a cup of sugar adds a great deal of juice to a mixture already calculated to set. Increase the gelatin in the base by roughly half, or drain the crushed fruit and use the juice sparingly, or the mold will slump when unmolded.
- A cup of sugar is period-sweetA cup of sugar to two cups of fruit is sweeter than modern taste generally wants; with modern cultivated strawberries, half a cup is closer to the mark.
- Raw egg whiteSome Charlotte Russe bases of this era fold in unbeaten or lightly beaten egg white for lightness. If the base recipe does, substitute pasteurized egg white or omit it — the dessert is never cooked.
- Setting and yieldThe original gives no chilling time. A quart mold needs at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better. A charlotte of this size serves six to eight.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in warm — not hot — water for about ten seconds and invert onto a chilled plate. Hot water melts the outer layer of cream and the ladyfingers slide.
Charlotte Russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême, who is said to have named the cold, cream-filled version for his Russian patron, distinguishing it from the older baked apple charlotte set in buttered bread. By the turn of the twentieth century the dish had become thoroughly domesticated in American cookbooks: gelatin was cheap and reliable in packet form, ladyfingers could be bought, and a charlotte was the standard company dessert that could be made the day before. Lowney's Cook Book, issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's promotional volume, and its dessert chapter is broad enough to carry charlotte variations.