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Apple Charlotte
Butter a mold and line it with onequarter-inch slices of stale bread, dipped into butter. The slices should fit closely together and may even overlap. Fill the center with stewed tart apples, mashed and seasoned with butter, sugar and nutmeg. Chopped almonds may be added if liked. Cover the top of the mold with the stale bread, dipped in melted butter and bake in a hot oven for thirty minutes. The bread should have the appearance of being sautéd and be as brown as toast. Turn on to a platter and serve hot.
A charlotte is a bread-lined mold, and the whole dish stands or falls on the bread being thoroughly saturated with butter and sealed at the seams. Below are the details the 1911 text assumes you already know.
- The hinge: no gapsThe bread lining must overlap with no bare mold showing and no open seams, or the apple leaks out and the charlotte collapses when turned out. Cut wedges for the bottom and rectangles for the sides, and press the joints together firmly.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. The bread needs to brown and crisp rather than steam, and thirty minutes at that heat is about right for a 1-quart mold.
- Bread and butterStale means dry and firm, not moldy: day-old white sandwich bread or a plain white loaf, crusts removed. Dipping in melted butter means both sides fully coated, so allow 4 to 6 tablespoons for a quart mold.
- The apple fillingAbout 2 lb of tart apples (Bramley, Granny Smith) stewed down and mashed gives roughly 2 cups. Cook it thick and dry; a wet filling steams the bread from the inside.
- VesselA charlotte mold is a plain metal pail-shaped tin with slightly tapered sides, but a 1-quart souffle dish, small deep cake tin or ovenproof bowl works. Butter it well and, if you doubt the release, line the base with a round of parchment.
- Turning outRest the baked charlotte five to ten minutes before inverting; hot from the oven the walls are fragile. Run a thin knife around the rim, set the platter on top and turn the whole thing over in one motion.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. It wants a pouring sauce or cream.
The charlotte is a bread-lined mold of stewed fruit, and the apple version is the older and plainer of the family: the better-known charlotte russe, built from sponge fingers and Bavarian cream and generally credited to the early nineteenth-century French kitchen, borrowed the shape but abandoned the bread. The name is traditionally linked to Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, though that attribution is repeated far more often than it is documented. What makes the dish appear in a 1911 American cook book is thrift as much as fashion: it turns stale bread and windfall apples into something that comes out of the mold looking deliberate, which is precisely the sort of economy the Butterick publications, aimed at middle-class housekeepers who did their own cooking, liked to teach.