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Delicate Charlotte Russe
4 egg whites. 2 tablespoons gelatin. 1/2 cup sweet milk. 1 pint whipped cream. Beat eggs stiff, add sugar and whip well. Dissolve gelatin in milk on stove and when cool enough whip into eggs and sugar. Two tablespoons of sherry. Set in ice to congeal. Line bowl with lady fingers if liked.
A cold gelatin cream of the kind that filled the "frozen and iced desserts" chapters of American cookbooks a century ago. It cannot be recommended today, and the notes below explain why, along with what the archaic wording means.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe four whites are beaten with sugar and served as they are; nothing in the method brings them to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The gelatin is dissolved in half a cup of milk and then deliberately cooled before it touches the eggs, so even that step contributes no meaningful heat. Use a current recipe if you want a charlotte russe.
- Held cold for hoursHeld cold to set -- "Set in ice to congeal" meant an ice chest, or a bowl packed in ice, left until a two-tablespoon gelatin set firms. The raw-egg mixture is the specific problem, not the cold itself.
- The sugar is missingThe method says "add sugar and whip well," but no quantity appears in the ingredient list. This is a genuine gap in the original rather than something that can be converted.
- Two tablespoons gelatinRoughly two and a half to three modern quarter-ounce envelopes, more than a quart of aerated cream and egg white would usually need today. Period recipes commonly call for more gelatin than modern ones.
- "Sweet milk"Plain fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were still everyday baking ingredients when this was written. It carries no sugar.
- Lady fingersThe dry savoiardi type of sponge finger, not the soft supermarket kind. Here the lining is optional ("if liked"); the biscuits line a straight-sided bowl or mold and stay crisp against the set cream.
- YieldA pint of whipped cream plus four whites makes a generous quart or more of mixture.
Charlotte russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême, who is said to have renamed an English baked apple charlotte as a cold, ladyfinger-lined cream and given it a Russian flourish in honor of Tsar Alexander I, in whose service he briefly worked. By the time this recipe was written down, the dish had become thoroughly domestic American: gelatin sold in cheap standard packets, whipping cream was reliable, and the whole thing could be set in an ice chest without a mold or a pastry cook. The version here is called "delicate," and it uses whites only and no custard base — no yolks to cook, no stirring over water, nothing but beating and chilling. That labor-saving shortcut is exactly what makes it unsafe by present standards, and it is a fair marker of how differently the period weighed the risk of uncooked egg.