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Charlotte Mousse
Soften three cakes of chocolate. When soft work the chocolate to a paste with a little syrup flavored with vanilla; warm and add the white of one egg whipped and sweetened, and a pint and a half of whipped cream, flavored with vanilla sugar. Pack a quart mould in pounded and salted ice, fill, put a cover on, lay ice on the top of that and leave for an hour, then unmould onto a dish.
A pre-refrigeration frozen chocolate mousse, set in an ice-and-salt bath rather than a freezer. The obstacle is not the technique but the uncooked egg white, which in this method never reaches a temperature that would make it safe.
- The raw egg whiteThe chocolate paste is only "warmed," and the whipped white is folded in afterward, then set in ice for an hour and served. Nothing in the sequence brings the egg to a pasteurizing temperature, and the unmoulded dessert warms as it stands on the dish. Use a current recipe for chocolate mousse if you want to make this kind of dessert.
- Why the hour is not a freezeWhy the hour may not be a full freeze -- A quart mould buried in salted ice for only one hour will firm a cream mixture but may not freeze it hard through. Modern frozen-mousse recipes generally cook the egg base, use pasteurized egg, or omit egg entirely.
- "Three cakes of chocolate"Genuinely ambiguous. Late nineteenth-century chocolate was sold in pressed cakes of varying size, from roughly one ounce to several ounces apiece; Oscar's kitchen would have used a single familiar brand. There is no reliable conversion, and the recipe gives no weight.
- "Soften" the chocolateThis means melting it gently over hot water, not tempering. Sugar arrives twice, once as flavored syrup and again as vanilla sugar; cakes of chocolate in this period ranged from unsweetened to sweetened, so how much sweetness came from the chocolate itself is unclear.
- Vanilla sugarGranulated sugar stored with a split vanilla bean until scented. It was a standard pastry-kitchen staple in an era when vanilla extract was expensive and often adulterated.
- Pounded and salted iceIce broken small and layered with coarse salt, which drops the bath below the freezing point of water. The recipe has ice laid on top of the cover as well as packed round the mould, so the top sets along with the sides.
- YieldA quart mould of this richness serves six to eight; the pint and a half of cream is the bulk of it.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896. A mousse in this period meant something specific and distinct from ice cream: no custard, no churning, just whipped cream lightened with beaten egg white and set still in a covered mould packed in ice and salt, so the texture came from trapped air rather than from working the mixture as it froze. The "Charlotte" in the name is sometimes taken to point to the moulded, unmoulded presentation associated with charlotte desserts rather than to any lining of cake or ladyfingers, which this version does not use, though nothing in the recipe settles the question. The reliance on a raw white as the aerating agent was ordinary practice in professional kitchens well into the twentieth century, and it is the single feature of the recipe that has not survived changing understanding of egg safety.