Home › Cold Desserts › Orange Charlotte
Orange Charlotte
1/3 box gelatine or 1⅓ tablespoons granulated gelatine 1/3 cup cold water 1/3 cup boiling water 1 cup sugar 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup orange juice and pulp Whites 3 eggs Whip from 2 cups cream • Soak gelatine in cold water, dissolve in boiling water, strain, and add sugar, lemon juice, orange juice, and pulp. Chill in pan of ice-water; when quite thick, beat with wire spoon or whisk until frothy, then add whites of eggs beaten stiff, and fold in cream. Line a mould with sections of oranges, turn in mixture, smooth evenly, and chill.
The measurements here belong to a kitchen that bought gelatine in boxes rather than envelopes, and the finished dessert is never heated at any point. That second fact is the reason to read this one rather than make it.
- Uncooked egg white is the problemThree stiffly beaten whites are folded into a cold gelatine base and then chilled, so no part of the dessert ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Cooks of the period accepted that risk; a modern cook should not, particularly for a dish served to children, elderly guests or anyone pregnant or immunocompromised. If you want an orange charlotte, use a current recipe built on pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue.
- Chilling does not helpRefrigeration slows bacterial growth but kills nothing, and a sweet, high-moisture gelatine mixture sitting for hours in a mould is a reasonable growth medium. The long cold set that makes the dessert work is also what makes the raw-white version worse rather than better.
- "1/3 box gelatine"Gelatine was then sold in boxes, and the book gives 1 1/3 tablespoons of granulated gelatine as the alternative; the tablespoon figure is the more useful of the two today. The two measures need not have been exactly equivalent, and the box size is not stated here.
- "Whip from 2 cups cream"This means the whipped froth obtained from two cups of heavy cream, not two cups of whipped cream. Period practice was to skim the stiff froth off as it formed while whipping, so the volume actually folded in was less than a modern whipping of two cups would give.
- The mouldThe recipe calls only for "a mould"; the orange sections are pressed against the wall so they show when the dessert is turned out. Nothing is baked -- the mould here is a chilling vessel only.
- YieldThe book gives no yield or mould size; the quantities suggest something upwards of a quart.
Charlottes take their name from the eighteenth-century English apple charlotte, a hot dish of buttered bread and fruit, but by the late nineteenth century the word had been stretched to cover a whole family of cold gelatine-and-cream desserts, generally traced to the influence of Antonin Carême's charlotte russe, which lined a mould with sponge fingers and filled it with bavarian cream. Orange Charlotte belongs to the American branch of that family, where granulated gelatine and winter citrus made a showy moulded dessert possible in an ordinary household kitchen. The Boston Cooking-School book prints a run of these side by side, all built on the same method — soften gelatine, dissolve, flavour, chill to the point of thickening, then whip air into it — producing a light dessert without a custard to cook.