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American Apple Charlotte
This can only be made "just right" when extra good, easy-baking apples are at hand, because the raw apples should be done by the time the bread at bottom is browned. Pippins and bellflowers are best. 40 thin, square slices of bread. 2 pounds of pared apples. 3/4 pound of butter. 3/4 pound of sugar. Cinnamon or nutmeg.
The slices of bread should be all of one size. Dip one side in melted butter and place them, buttered side down, in close order in a shallow baking-pan; place half an apple or two quarters on each slice and bake brown with repeated bastings with a syrup made of the sugar, butter and cup of hot water and cinnamon. The apples ought to shine transparently without black edges when done. Dish up with an egg-slice.
Charlotte a la Marialva.
Named, probably, after a French cathedral town; possibly a monastery. It is a charlotte of the most elaborate degree, the bread cut in small fancy shapes and placed in patterns, or in fingers lapping edges, on the sides of a mould spread with butter. Apples and apricots, sugar and butter and fruit jelly all stewed down to a paste is used to fill. Baked, glazed, and wine sauce served with it.
The preceding directions and examples apply to PEACH CHARLOTTES. PEAR CHARLOTTES. CHARLOTTES OF MIXED FRUITS. Almost any kind can be used. The poorest that can be used for such a purpose are the mulberries dyed with logwood, which are now being sold for canned blackberries. Mulberries with their own natural color, when mixed with sour apples, are good enough.
Now here, in the next, is another knot to be untied. Not that the charlotte itself is a knot, else it were better cut than picked apieces, but the name, "friar's omelet," whence comes it? The clue in this case is fainter than the almost invisible thread which led through the maze to Fair Rosamond's bower. Why should a charlotte, or rather, perhaps a mixture of apples be called an omelet, unless, because, it looked like omelet? And suppose the preceding charlotte a la Marialva came from a monastery and the English cooks made an apple mixture as near like it as they could and called it friar's omelet. And suppose the French cooks adopted the English mixture because it was good and called it English apple cake. That is how it seems to have been. There used to be a saying about the longest way round being the shortest way home, and another about going from home to learn the news. Some English names being placed backwards in French have come back to our language as new words, as canteen from tin can; so in French cook books we find that called English apple cake, which in English on both sides of the Atlantic is called friar's omelet.
Suppose once more that some person out of patience with trying to line his charlotte mould with bread patterns of leaves, flowers, crosses and hearts and diamonds, just crumble the bread fine and pressed a blanket like coat of crumbs on to the thick buttered sides of the mould, filled that with the following mixture and baked it of a handsome reddish brown, why then you have a very fair conception of the way that many of our good but rough-and-ready American dishes came to be made.
A baked apple charlotte of the plainest sort: buttered bread as a base, apple halves on top, basted with syrup until glossy. The whole thing hinges on the apples cooking through in the time the bread takes to brown.
- Pick the right applePippins and Bellflowers are named here because they bake quickly, which is what the recipe depends on. Other quick-cooking apples such as Gravenstein, Golden Delicious, Northern Spy or Newtown Pippin can stand in; a hard, late-keeping apple may still be firm by the time the bread is well browned.
- The quantities do not matchTwo pounds of pared apples is roughly five or six medium fruit, which yields ten to twelve halves or twenty quarters, not forty slices of bread. Either scale the bread down to the fruit or double the apples; as printed, the numbers are inconsistent.
- Butter and sugar by weightThree-quarters of a pound of butter is three sticks (340 g), and three-quarters of a pound of granulated sugar is about 1 2/3 cups. The butter is divided between dipping the bread and the basting syrup; the sugar goes into the syrup.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350°F, suits this: hot enough to brown the buttered bread, slow enough that the apples cook through. At 425°F the bread will scorch long before the fruit gives way.
- The syrup and the bastingMelt the sugar, remaining butter, a cup of hot water and the spice together into a thin syrup and spoon it over every ten minutes or so. The repeated basting is what produces the transparent, unblackened apples the author asks for; skip it and the exposed fruit dries and darkens at the edges.
- Egg-sliceA period term for a broad, thin, slotted turner, what we would call a fish slice or offset spatula. The bread base is fragile once soaked with syrup, so lift each portion whole rather than serving with a spoon.
- Timing and yieldExpect 45 minutes to an hour at 350°F for apple halves, less for quarters. Scaled sensibly, one slice of bread and one apple half is a serving.
- The mulberry asideThe complaint about mulberries "dyed with logwood" sold as canned blackberries is a note on late nineteenth-century food adulteration, not an instruction. Logwood dye is not a food ingredient; ignore that sentence entirely.
This reads as Jessup Whitehead, whose late nineteenth-century Chicago trade manuals were written for hotel and restaurant cooks, which accounts for both the bulk quantities and the digressive, opinionated commentary between recipes. Whitehead's etymologies should be read as speculation rather than fact: the name "à la Marialva" is usually said to honour a Portuguese noble house rather than a French cathedral town or monastery, and his chain of reasoning from that dish to "friar's omelet" to the French "English apple cake" is his own, offered as such. What is solid is the family resemblance he describes. Apple charlottes, friar's omelet and their many cousins all draw on the same thrifty practice of lining or layering a mould with buttered bread and filling it with stewed fruit, a dish that turns stale loaf and windfall apples into something worth bringing to table. His closing image of a cook losing patience with fancy bread cut-outs and simply pressing crumbs into the mould is a vivid account of how such European dishes were simplified in American kitchens.