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Charlotte Russe Filling for Sponge Cakes
1 cup double cream. 1-3 cup sugar. 1 egg white. 2 tablespoons of wine or vanilla.
Whip cream until stiff, beat eggs stiff and add sugar to eggs; whip until light. Fold in the cream, add flavoring and put between cake and on top. Serve same day it is made.
A whipped-cream filling stabilized with beaten egg white, meant to be spread between sponge layers and eaten the same day. The egg white is never cooked, and that is the problem with the recipe as printed.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe white is beaten with sugar and folded into cream, and the finished filling goes onto already-baked cake. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell egg survives intact into the served dish. A current recipe using pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- Why "serve same day" was the safeguardWhy "serve same day" matters -- The recipe says only to serve it the day it is made, without giving a reason. Whipped cream weeps and slumps within a day, and a cream-and-egg-white filling standing at room temperature is also a good growth medium; both would argue for eating it promptly.
- The printed fraction"1-3 cup sugar" is almost certainly one-third of a cup; hyphenated fractions of this kind turn up in the printing and transcription of books of this period.
- Double creamIn modern British usage double cream runs around 48 percent butterfat and whips very stiff, though in American books of this period "double cream" generally meant no more than a rich, heavy cream. American heavy or whipping cream at about 36 percent is the nearest supermarket equivalent.
- The wine"Wine" here was probably a sweet or fortified one — sherry, Madeira or Marsala — rather than table wine, though the recipe does not specify. Two tablespoons of a thin acidic wine will slacken whipped cream noticeably.
- YieldOne cup of cream whips to roughly two cups, enough to fill and thinly top a small sponge layer cake.
Charlotte russe proper is a molded dessert — ladyfingers or sponge lining a mold, filled with Bavarian cream — and is generally traced to the early nineteenth-century French kitchen, with the name commonly attributed to Carême. By the time Mrs. Wilson was writing for Philadelphia readers around 1920, "charlotte russe" in American usage had loosened to mean, in at least some contexts, a sweetened whipped-cream preparation served with sponge cake, and in New York it survived for decades as a street and bakery item: a paper-collared cup of sponge topped with piped cream. This entry is that later, simplified sense — not a molded dessert at all but a filling, and one that depends on egg white for the body that gelatin would have supplied in the classic version.