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Apple Charlotte
A LA PARISIENNE.
Compote of apples, or apples stewed dry and sweet, baked between two layers of buttered bread and glazed with egg and sugar. 40 small thin slices of French rolls. 2 pounds of pared and quartered apples 1 pound of sugar. 3/4 pound of butter. 1 or 2 eggs for glaze. Nutmeg or cinnamon.
Stew the apples soft with three-fourths of the sugar and a pint of water and steam shut in; then mash with a spoon and grate nutmeg in. Dip the slices of rolls as lightly as possible in the butter melted in a deep pan--dip both sides without touching the salt dregs. Line two bright, three-quart pans with them, bottom and sides, divide the apple in, placing it well around the sides; lay more dipped slices all over the tops slightly pressed into the fruit, and bake the charlottes of a nice toast color, bottom crusts as well as top. Then with a brush wet them over with egg and water; dredge the remaining sugar over and bake ten minutes more to glaze. To be dished out of the pans; no sauce needed unless for pudding, when sweet cream is best.
For a charlotte to be served whole still greater care is needed in baking. Take a deep mould, a six or eight sided cake or pudding mould does. Cut slices of bread to fit--bottom, top and sides. Spread butter rather thickly on one side the slices, dip the other side in beaten egg; place them with the butter next the tin, fill the inside with the apple compote; place the cover of bread on top and bake in a moderate oven over half an hour. Turn it out carefully on to the dish, glaze over with egg and sugar and the red-hot salamander and pour round it either diluted red jelly or else whipped cream.
A bread-lined apple charlotte, given in two forms: baked in shallow pans and spooned out, or moulded and turned out whole. The instructions assume a commercial pastry kitchen, but both versions work in a home oven.
- The hinge: dry appleThe filling must be stewed down until it holds its shape on a spoon, not loose apple sauce. Wet compote soaks the bread and the moulded charlotte collapses when you turn it out. Stew uncovered at the end to drive off moisture if needed.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe calls for "a moderate oven" for the moulded charlotte, which is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. No temperature is given for the pan version. Either way you are baking to colour rather than to a clock, and the bottom crust needs to brown as well, so use metal pans on a low rack.
- "Salt dregs"Butter was salted and often unclarified; melted in a deep pan, the salty milk solids settle to the bottom. Dip the bread in the clear butter above them. Using unsalted butter removes the problem entirely.
- French rollsForty thin slices of nineteenth-century French roll means a firm, close-crumbed white bread. A day-old baguette or a firm white sandwich loaf with crusts removed both work; a soft modern supermarket loaf turns to paste in butter.
- SugarA pound of sugar to two pounds of apples is very sweet by current taste. Three-quarters of it goes into the fruit and the rest is dredged on for the glaze; halving the sugar in the filling is reasonable if you are using sweet modern dessert apples rather than a sharp cooking apple.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle heated red in the fire and held over food to brown it. A kitchen blowtorch or a few minutes under a hot broiler does the same job ewatch it closely, since sugar on egg wash colours fast.
- Pans and yieldThe recipe calls for two bright three-quart pans, which is a large quantity; no yield is given. For the moulded charlotte, a charlotte mould, souffle dish or deep cake tin of similar capacity will do, scaled to whatever quantity of apple you have stewed.
- Turning outLet the moulded charlotte stand ten to fifteen minutes before inverting so the filling firms. Turning it out straight from the oven makes a split casing more likely; the recipe simply says to turn it out carefully.
- "Diluted red jelly"Redcurrant jelly thinned with a little water and warmed, poured around the base as a sauce. Any tart red jelly serves.
Charlotte belongs to a family of moulded bread-and-fruit puddings known in English and American cookery from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the name is usually traced, without firm documentation, to a royal Charlotte, and the version lined with sponge fingers and filled with Bavarian cream became famous as charlotte russe, generally credited to Car"me. The older apple charlotte, as here, is the plainer parent: buttered bread standing in for pastry, and stewed apple standing in for anything more costly.