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Charlotte Russe
¼ box gelatine or 1 tablespoon granulated 1/3 cup powdered sugar Whip from 3½ cups thin gelatine cream 1/4 cup cold water 1/3 cup scalded cream 1½ teaspoons vanilla 6 lady fingers Soak gelatine in cold water, dissolve in scalded cream, strain into a bowl, and add sugar and vanilla. Set bowl in pan of ice-water and stir constantly until it begins to thicken, then fold in whip from cream, adding one-third at a time. Should gelatine mixture become too thick, melt over hot water, and again cool before adding whip. Trim ends and sides of lady fingers, place around inside of a mould, crust side out, one-half inch apart. Turn in mixture, and chill. Serve garnished with cubes of Wine Jelly. Charlotte Russe is sometimes made in individual moulds; these are often garnished on top with some of mixture forced through a pastry bag and tube. Individual moulds are frequently lined with thin slices of sponge cake cut to fit moulds. 2 tablespoons granulated gelatine 1/2 box gelatine or 1/2 cup cold water ½ cup boiling water
A gelatine-set vanilla cream in a ladyfinger case, from the era when cream was skimmed at home and whipping meant skimming the froth off the top. Two things need translating before you start: the gelatine measure and the word "whip."
- "Whip from 3½ cups thin cream"Thin cream was whipped in a bowl and the stiff froth skimmed off as it rose, the unwhipped remainder going back for another pass. Modern heavy cream (36 per cent) roughly doubles in volume when whipped, so something in the order of 1½ to 2 cups whipped to soft peaks should stand in for the whip taken from 3½ cups of thin cream. Do not whip to stiff peaks or the folding will break it.
- Scalded creamHeat the ⅓ cup of cream to steaming, around 180F, with bubbles at the edge but no boil. It only has to be hot enough to dissolve the bloomed gelatine completely; undissolved grains show up as rubbery threads later.
- The hinge: catch it as it thickensStir over ice-water until the mixture is the consistency of raw egg white, then fold in the whip at once. Too warm and the cream deflates and separates into a foam layer over a jelly layer; too cool and you get set lumps through the cream. The instruction to remelt over hot water and re-cool is the correct fix and worth using without hesitation.
- Lining the mouldTrim the ladyfingers flat on the ends and along one long side so they stand upright, crust side against the mould. Six will line only a small mould; a larger one will need proportionately more. The half-inch spacing means the set cream shows between the fingers when the charlotte is turned out.
- Chilling and unmouldingFour hours in the refrigerator is a minimum, overnight is better. Dip the mould in warm water for three or four seconds only, then invert; longer and the cream slumps.
- Wine Jelly garnishThe wine jelly called for is a separate recipe from the same chapter, cut into cubes and heaped around the base. Any clear firm jelly cut into dice serves the same purpose, or leave it off entirely.
- YieldEnough for one small charlotte serving about six, or six to eight individual moulds.
The charlotte russe is generally traced to Marie-Antoine Carême, who is said to have adapted the older English apple charlotte, a hot pudding baked in a bread-lined mould, into a cold cream set in a case of ladyfingers, and to have named it for a Russian patron. By the time Fannie Farmer put it in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book it had become a standard American company dessert, and in New York it survived well into the twentieth century as street food, sold in a paper cup with a cardboard disc pushed up from below. The recipe's assumption that a cook has "thin cream" on hand and will whip the froth off it in stages is a reminder that cream came in grades by the depth of the skim, not by a printed percentage on a carton.