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Charlotte
Whites of 4 eggs 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Custard sauce 3 tablespoons cornstarch 1 cup boiling water Moisten the cornstarch with a little cold water; pour over it the boiling water and sugar and cook until the mixture begins to clarify. Pour while hot over the well-beaten whites of the eggs; mix and flavor and turn into a bowl that has been rinsed in cold water. At serving time turn out and pour custard around it. 2 oranges 1 pint milk 1/2 cup sugar
This is a cornstarch charlotte — a molded meringue set with hot starch paste rather than gelatin — served with a custard sauce whose ingredients are listed but whose method is not. A few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: pour boiling hot, and beatThe hinge: pour hot, and beat -- The starch mixture should go over the whites while it is still hot, poured gradually and beaten in as you go; the recipe's own words are "pour while hot." Added in a lump or after it has cooled, the paste is liable to set in lumps rather than blend through the foam.
- "Until it begins to clarify"Cornstarch slurry is opaque and chalky when raw and turns glossy and translucent when the starch gelatinizes. That change, plus a minute or two of continued boiling, is the cue; undercooked starch tastes raw and will not hold the mold.
- Raw egg whiteThe hot starch warms the whites but does not reliably bring them to a pasteurizing temperature, and nothing here is cooked afterward. Use pasteurized whites, or in-shell pasteurized eggs, if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- The unlisted yolksThe custard sauce ingredients — 2 oranges, 1 pint milk, 1/2 cup sugar — appear at the foot with no yolks and no method. A soft custard of this size takes 4 to 6 yolks (conveniently, the four left from the charlotte), stirred with the scalded milk and sugar over low heat to about 175F, until it coats a spoon. The oranges are best used as grated zest steeped in the milk plus the strained juice stirred in after the custard has cooled; juice added hot will curdle it.
- Rinsing the bowlA film of cold water on the bowl keeps the meringue from gripping the sides, the old equivalent of oiling a mold. Use a plain round bowl; the recipe specifies no size, and no chilling time beyond leaving it until serving time.
- UnmoldingLoosen the edge with a wet knife, invert onto a chilled rimmed dish, and pour the sauce around rather than over — the meringue is fragile and the custard will sink into it.
- YieldRoughly six modest servings. Best eaten the day it is made; starch-set mixtures of this kind tend to weep on standing.
A charlotte in the strict sense is a mold lined with bread, sponge or ladyfingers and filled — the apple charlotte of English cookery, and the cold charlotte russe, traditionally credited to Carême, lined with savoy biscuits and filled with bavarian cream. By the time American loose-leaf and household manuals of the early twentieth century were printed, the word had loosened to mean almost any cold molded sweet turned out of a bowl, lining or no lining. This version belongs to the large family of cornstarch desserts that filled the pudding chapters of the period: cornstarch was cheap, shelf-stable, and did the setting work that gelatin or cream would otherwise do. Combining it with beaten whites gave a dessert with the volume of a bavarian and the cost of a blancmange, and the leftover yolks went straight into the sauce.