Home › Doughnuts › Charlotte Russe
Charlotte Russe
1 pint cream 1/4 cup powdered sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Mix ingredients. Have very cold and whip to stiff froth, turning under cream when it first rises. Line dish with sponge cake or lady fingers, fill with whipped cream and serve cold.
A stripped-down charlotte russe: no gelatin, no custard, just sweetened whipped cream in a cake-lined dish. That simplicity is also its weakness, so the timing of assembly matters more than anything else.
- Assemble lateWith no gelatin to set it, the cream begins to weep into the sponge within an hour or two. Line the dish ahead, but fill and serve the same afternoon, keeping it refrigerated until the moment it goes to the table.
- The creamA pint is 2 cups; use heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or better. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips but holds its structure less well, which matters in a dessert that has nothing else supporting it.
- "Very cold"This is the hinge. Chill the cream, the bowl and the whisk; cream that is not thoroughly cold whips poorly and holds air badly, and over-whipping cream that has warmed will turn it to butter. On a warm day, set the mixing bowl in a larger bowl of ice.
- "Turning under cream when it first rises"A hand-whisk instruction: as the surface foams up, fold the risen cream back down into the liquid so everything aerates evenly. With a stand mixer this happens on its own, but stop at stiff peaks that still look glossy rather than grainy.
- Powdered sugarIn a modern kitchen this reads as confectioners' sugar, which carries a little cornstarch; in books of this period "powdered sugar" often meant finely ground granulated sugar. Either dissolves readily into cream. A quarter cup makes a lightly sweetened cream.
- The moldThe recipe says only "dish". A charlotte mold is a small tin with slightly flared sides, but any straight-sided glass dish or souffle dish works. Stand the ladyfingers upright around the wall, rounded sides out, and trim a few to tile the base.
- LadyfingersCrisp Italian savoiardi are firmer and hold their shape better against damp cream than the soft supermarket kind. Sponge cake should be cut in fingers about half an inch thick.
- YieldA pint of cream roughly doubles in volume when whipped, enough to fill a 1-quart mold and serve six.
Charlotte russe is generally traced to the French pastry cooks of the early nineteenth century, and is often credited to Antonin Careme, who is said to have named it for a Russian patron; the older English "charlotte" was a hot dish of buttered bread and cooked apple, and the russe is its cold, ladyfinger-lined descendant. By the time this book was printed the dish had become an American standby, and the version here shows how far it had drifted from the pastry kitchen: the classic filling is a bavarian cream set with gelatin, while this one is simply sweetened whipped cream, quick to make and meant to be eaten at once. Charlotte russe survived longest in that plain form, notably as the paper-collared cups of sponge and whipped cream sold from New York bakeries and candy stores well into the twentieth century.