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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.