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Strawberry Charlotte
1/2 box gelatin. 1 quart berries. 2 cups sugar. 1 cup pineapple juice (water will do).
Pick, wash and cap strawberries. Let stand with one cup sugar for an hour. Mash and strain out cup juice. May be put through colander, letting some of the pulp go through. Put this cup of juice over the gelatin. Heat to the boiling point the pineapple juice. Beat the eggs stiff over crushed ice, add the sugar and beat well again. Pour over this a little at a time the other mixture. When nearly set, put in mould dipped in cold water. Line a pretty mold with strawberries cut in halves; when chilled and ready to use, turn on platter and garnish with whole berries and whipped cream. Serve with strawberry sauce.
A moulded gelatin charlotte from the era when such desserts were the centerpiece of a spring table. As printed it cannot be made safely, and the ingredient list is incomplete besides.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedRaw eggs, never brought to a safe temperature -- The eggs are beaten stiff over crushed ice and the gelatin mixture is added "a little at a time" — a volume of warm liquid far too small, and far too cool by the time it meets an ice-chilled foam, to bring the eggs anywhere near a pasteurizing temperature. The finished charlotte is then chilled and served cold, so nothing in the method ever reaches a safe temperature. Use a current recipe if you want a strawberry charlotte.
- The eggs are not in the ingredient listThey appear only in the method. There is no way to know whether Mrs. Wilson meant two, four or six, nor whether whites alone or whole eggs. That gap alone makes the recipe unreproducible as printed.
- The sugar is also split without directionTwo cups are called for; one cup goes onto the berries to macerate, and "add the sugar" to the eggs presumably means the second. Nothing states this outright.
- Half a box of gelatinA box of granulated gelatin in 1920 held about an ounce, divided into small envelopes of roughly a quarter ounce each. Half a box is therefore in the region of two modern envelopes, about half an ounce — but boxes varied by brand and the figure is an estimate, not a conversion.
- Why the pineapple juice is boiledFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that digests gelatin and leaves the mould a syrupy failure, and heating to boiling destroys the enzyme. Whether that is the reason for the instruction here is less clear: the recipe allows plain water in place of the juice, and that too would be heated, so the boiling may simply be to dissolve the soaked gelatin. Canned juice has already been heat-treated.
Mary A. Wilson published a cookbook in Philadelphia in 1920 — commonly catalogued as Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book — on the strength of her years writing household columns for the Ladies' Home Journal and her wartime work on food conservation. The charlotte she gives here belongs to a long line descending from the charlotte russe, generally credited to the French chef Antonin Carême in the early nineteenth century — a chilled cream or custard set in a lined mould and turned out whole. By Wilson's day the American version had largely abandoned the ladyfinger casing for a lining of fruit and a setting agent of packaged granulated gelatin, which had become cheap and reliable enough in the previous few decades to put moulded desserts within reach of any household with an icebox. The instruction to beat eggs over crushed ice is a mark of that same icebox era.