Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Fruit Charlotte
Fruit Charlotte
Line a charlotte-mould with sweetened short paste, mask the paste all round the inside with paper, fill it with flour, and bake; when done take it out of the oven, turn out the flour, remove the paper, turn the paste out of the mould, spread a layer of apricot marmalade inside it and put it back into the mould. Prepare a coarse salpicon with some preserved fruits and let them soak in maraschino for three hours. Boil a stick of vanilla and seven ounces of sugar with one pint of milk and beat in the yolks of seven eggs. Strain this cream and when it is cool freeze it in a freezer; when frozen mix in gradually three tablespoonfuls of maraschino and six tablespoonfuls of whipped and sweetened cream. Drain the fruits and fill the charlotte-mould with alternate layers of the fruits and cream. Shut the mould, lute its junctures with paste and pack it in salted ice for two hours. When ready, turn it out onto a fancy dish, mask it all over with apricot marmalade, ornament the top with a variety of different-colored preserved fruits, and serve.
An iced bombe built inside a baked pastry shell, written for a nineteenth-century pastry brigade that had a hand-crank freezer and a supply of rock salt. Everything in it can be done at home, but two steps — the blind bake and the freezing — need translating.
- The charlotte mouldA straight-sided or slightly tapered tin pail with a close-fitting lid, generally somewhere between one and two quarts. A deep cake tin or a metal bowl of similar capacity works; the lid matters because the mould is buried in ice, so cover tightly with foil if there is no lid.
- Flour as pie weightsLining the raw shell with paper and filling it with flour is blind baking. Dried beans or ceramic weights do the same job. Bake at 375F until the paste is set and pale gold, then remove paper and weights and return it briefly to colour and dry the base.
- SalpiconSimply a dice. Here it means candied and preserved fruits — cherries, angelica, apricot, citron, pineapple — cut coarse rather than fine, then macerated in maraschino for three hours.
- MaraschinoThe clear cherry-stone liqueur from Dalmatia, not the syrup from a jar of neon cherries. Luxardo is the usual substitute. Kirsch is closer in spirit than any modern maraschino syrup.
- The custardSeven ounces of sugar and seven yolks to a pint of milk is a rich, sweet crème anglaise. Cook it over low heat to 175-180F, until it coats a spoon, and strain at once. Do not let it approach a boil or it will scramble around the vanilla pod.
- "Freeze it in a freezer"A freezer meant a churn packed with ice and rock salt. Use an ice-cream machine and churn to a soft-serve stage, then fold in the maraschino and whipped cream. Alcohol lowers the freezing point, so it goes in at the end or the base will never set.
- Luting and salted iceSealing the seam with paste (usually flour and water) kept brine out of the mould. In place of two hours in salted ice, freeze the assembled charlotte solid — six hours or overnight — then unmould by wrapping the outside in a hot cloth for a few seconds.
- Apricot marmaladeA sieved apricot glaze, not chunky preserve. Warm apricot jam with a spoonful of water and push it through a strainer; it should brush on smooth and set glossy.
- YieldA quart-and-a-half mould serves eight to ten. Assemble the day before and hold in the freezer, but glaze and decorate shortly before it goes to table, since the apricot dulls in a frost.
The charlotte began as a hot dish of buttered bread and stewed apple; it was Antonin Carême, in the early nineteenth century, who is generally credited with turning it into a cold moulded dessert lined with biscuits and filled with bavarian cream — the charlotte russe. This version goes a step further, replacing the biscuit lining with a baked short-paste case and the bavarois with an iced custard, so it is really a bombe wearing a charlotte's clothes. That combination of pastry, frozen custard, candied fruit and maraschino is squarely the grand-restaurant style Oscar Tschirky recorded at the Waldorf in the 1890s, when a hotel kitchen could keep an ice house, a stock of glacé fruit and enough pastry cooks to build a dessert in three separate stages before dinner service.