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Chocolate Charlotte
1/4 box gelatine or. 1/3 cup scalded cream. 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine 1/4 cup cold water ½ cup scalded cream 1½ squares unsweetened chocolate 3 tablespoons hot water 2/3 cup powdered sugar Whip from 3 cups cream 1 teaspoon vanilla 6 lady fingers Melt chocolate by placing in a small saucepan set in a larger saucepan of boiling water, add half the sugar, dilute with boiling water, and add to gelatine mixture while hot. Proceed same as in recipe for Charlotte Russe.
A gelatine-set chocolate cream folded into whipped cream and moulded in a lady-finger case. The book assumes you have just read Charlotte Russe on the preceding page, so the whole assembly is left unsaid.
- The hinge: temperatureThe warm chocolate-gelatine base must be combined with the whipped cream while it is still fluid but no longer hot, and folded fast. Too hot and the cream deflates into soup; too cool and the gelatine sets in threads through the mixture.
- The sugar figure is corruptThe sugar figure looks corrupt — "2½ cup powdered sugar" is implausible for this quantity of cream and chocolate, and is most likely a misreading of a fraction such as ⅔ cup. Treat it as uncertain and taste the base before folding.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant a 1 oz block, so 1½ squares is 1½ oz unsweetened chocolate. Modern baking bars are often 1 oz per segment, but check the wrapper rather than counting scored lines.
- Powdered sugar then and nowIn 1896 "powdered" meant granulated sugar ground fine, with no anti-caking starch. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which is harmless here and may slightly dull the finish; superfine (caster) sugar is closer to the original.
- Granulated gelatineOne tablespoon is about one and a third ¼ oz envelopes of modern powdered gelatine (an envelope runs roughly 2¼ teaspoons), a generous amount for this volume. Soften it in the ¼ cup cold water for five minutes, then dissolve completely in the scalded cream before the chocolate goes in.
- "Whip from 3 cups cream"The instruction means whip 3 cups of heavy cream and use the stiff froth skimmed off the top; in period practice the cream that stayed liquid was drained off and re-whipped rather than thrown away. Modern cream whips more uniformly, so less than 3 cups will yield the froth called for.
- The mouldLine a charlotte mould, straight-sided bowl or loaf pan with the lady fingers, rounded sides out, trimming them to stand upright. Six will only line a small mould; buy a dozen so you can patch gaps.
- Chilling and yieldNo setting time is given. Four hours in the refrigerator, or overnight, before unmoulding onto a cold platter. Serves six to eight.
The Charlotte Russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême in the early nineteenth century, a cold reworking of the older baked apple charlotte, and its name is usually explained as a compliment to a Russian patron or royal Charlotte — an attribution repeated everywhere and documented nowhere firmly. By the time Fannie Farmer was teaching at the Boston Cooking School, the form had become a fixture of American cold-dessert chapters: gelatine and whipped cream in a wall of lady fingers, needing no oven and no last-minute work. That was the point. Commercial granulated gelatine, sold in packets from the 1890s, replaced the day-long labor of boiling calves' feet for stock, and it let a household cook produce a moulded dessert that looked like restaurant pastry. Farmer's habit of writing a base recipe once and then giving variations by cross-reference — as here, "proceed same as in recipe for Charlotte Russe" — is what made the book so compact, and what makes single pages of it read as fragments today.