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Berry Charlotte
1 pint berries 1/2 cup water. 1 cup sugar 1 pint bread Wash the berries; stew them in the water and sugar until the juice forms a syrup, mashing the fruit with a vegetable masher, and straining to remove the seeds. Put alternate layers of bread and cooked berries in a mold and when cool set on the ice until needed. Turn out and serve with cream or with cold boiled custard.
This is a summer pudding under an American name, and the leaf as printed has lost part of its ingredient list — no quantity of berries or water survives. Work from the method rather than the numbers.
- The missing quantitiesOnly sugar (1 cup) and bread (1 pint, meaning a pint measure of trimmed slices or cubes) are given. A workable ratio for this style is about 1 quart of berries and 1/2 cup water to that cup of sugar; the original gives no figure, so treat any amount as a reconstruction.
- "1 pint bread"Bread was measured by volume in this period. Use a firm, close-crumbed white loaf a day or two old, crusts off, cut thin. Fresh squishy sandwich bread collapses into paste and will not hold the mold when turned out.
- Stew the berries brieflyCook only until the sugar dissolves and the juice runs freely as a syrup, about 5 minutes. Long boiling drives off the fresh fruit flavor and sets the pectin firm, which makes for jam rather than a soaking syrup.
- Straining is optionalThe instruction to strain out seeds suits blackberries, raspberries and currants. With blueberries or strawberries you can leave the fruit whole and skip the masher entirely.
- Wet every piece of breadThis is the hinge. Ladle syrup over each layer so no bread is left dry and pale; dry patches stay chalky and the pudding will not slice or unmold cleanly. Press the layers down as you build.
- "Set on the ice"An icebox instruction — refrigerate. Give it at least 6 hours and preferably overnight, with a small plate and a weight (a can will do) resting on the surface to compact it.
- UnmoldingLine the mold with plastic wrap before filling, which the original cook could not do, and the turn-out becomes reliable. Otherwise dip the mold briefly in warm water and run a thin knife around the edge.
- Cold boiled custardThis means a stirred pouring custard — egg yolks, milk and sugar cooked over water until it coats a spoon, then chilled. Not a baked custard. Lightly whipped or pouring cream is the simpler option.
The dish is a charlotte only by loose family resemblance: it belongs to the tradition in which stale bread is saturated with sweetened fruit juice and weighted until it sets. The logic behind it is thrift as much as pleasure — a cook book from the era of the icebox and the household berry patch assumes both a glut of soft fruit in July and a day-old loaf too dry for the table, and this pudding disposes of the two together. The instruction to "set on the ice" places the page somewhere in the long age of ice-cooling, when the coldest shelf in the house was the one nearest the melting block.