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Charlotte Panachee
Line six charlotte-moulds as for charlotte glaces, fill them with about a pint of vanilla ice-cream, then turn them onto six cold dessert-plates. Take a pastry-bag, and slide down in it a fancy-shaped tube, and pour into it one pint of vanilla cream, whipped; press a small quantity of this onto the top of the charlottes, arrange over them half a dozen macaroons, press on a little more cream about the size of a walnut on the top of each macaroon, then with the balance of the cream decorate the bottom of the charlottes all around, and then serve.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooking one, and it assumes you already know the two things it never explains: how a charlotte mould is lined, and that everything must be brutally cold.
- The hinge: cold everythingThe dessert is built on the plate at room temperature, so the plates, the moulds, the cream and the piping bag all need to come out of the refrigerator or freezer at the last moment. Line and fill the moulds, freeze them solid for several hours, and pipe fast.
- "As for charlotte glaces"Oscar refers the reader back to an earlier recipe not repeated here; a charlotte mould of this kind is usually lined with ladyfingers or thin strips of sponge, trimmed flush, before the ice cream goes in. Split ladyfingers stood upright around the sides, with a disc cut for the base, gives the same result.
- Charlotte mouldsThe individual charlotte mould is a small tapered tin holding a few ounces. Straight-sided ramekins or dariole moulds do the job; line them and they will unmould cleanly if dipped for a second or two in warm water.
- A pint for sixOne pint of ice cream across six lined moulds is modest, about 5 tablespoons each once the sponge takes up room. Buy a quart if your moulds are generous.
- "Vanilla cream, whipped"This means heavy cream whipped with sugar and vanilla, not a cooked custard. Whip it to firm peaks or it will slump off the macaroons within a minute; a pint of cream yields close to a quart whipped, which is ample for six.
- MacaroonsThe macaroon meant here is almost certainly an almond macaroon, a crisp domed biscuit, and not a Parisian macaron; coconut macaroons existed by this date but are not what the word normally implied in a hotel dessert. Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a modern shelf and their bitterness is a help against all that cream.
- Piping"A fancy-shaped tube" means a decorative tube, most likely a star. Half a dozen macaroons is one per charlotte, each capped with a walnut-sized rosette, with a piped border round the base of each unmoulded charlotte.
- Yield and timingSix servings, and they will not wait. Assemble at the table's edge and send them out immediately, since the sponge and cream soften as the ice cream melts.
Panachée is French for plumed or variegated — the same word used for a striped tulip or a mixed ice — though in cookery it most often signals a mixture or variegation; whether it points here to the crest of piped cream and macaroons is a reading, not a documented sense. The charlotte itself is a nineteenth-century restaurant staple: a mould lined with sponge fingers and filled, served hot as a charlotte aux pommes or frozen as a charlotte glacée, the form generally credited to Antonin Carême's codifying work in the early 1800s. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, was not a chef but the man who ran the dining rooms, and this entry shows what that job produced: a dish built at the service end of the kitchen out of components already made, dressed for the plate, and depending entirely on speed. Frozen desserts like this one depended on a hotel's cold storage as much as its pastry cook, whether that meant harvested ice or the mechanical refrigeration then coming into use.