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Pear Charlotte
Cut some thin slices of stale bread, without the crust, and cut out a round with a one and one-half inch in diameter tin-cutter, then cut some heart-shaped pieces of bread, and dip them and the round piece in warmed butter. Put the latter at the bottom of a plain round charlotte mould, arrange the heart-shaped pieces overlapping each other round it, cut the slices of bread into strips one and one-half inches wide and of the height of the mould, dip them in butter and stand them all round the mould, also overlapping each other. Pare and core fifteen pears, cut them in quarters, put them in a sautepan with a little butter and vanilla sugar, and fry them. Put the pears in the mould when cooked, and brown the charlotte in the oven. Turn the charlotte out on a hot dish, mask it with reduced apricot jam, and serve.
A hot fruit charlotte in the classic French manner: a mould lined with buttered bread, filled with sautéed fruit, baked until the crust sets, and unmoulded. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the lining.
- The hinge: the bread must be saturated and gaplessEvery piece has to be dipped in warm melted butter until it is soaked through, and the strips around the wall must overlap firmly with no seams. Dry or loosely fitted bread will not fuse into a shell, and the charlotte collapses the moment it is turned out.
- The mouldA plain charlotte mould is a round tin, straight-sided or slightly flared; sizes vary, but something in the range of 1 to 2 quarts suits this quantity. A tall souffle dish or a deep round cake tin of similar capacity will do. Butter it before lining.
- Oven heatOscar gives none, and the pears go in already cooked, so the oven's job is only to brown and set the shell. A hot oven, around 400F, until the exposed bread is deep golden and firm; start checking well before 30 minutes. Too cool an oven leaves the crust pale and soft; too hot scorches the butter before the shell sets.
- Vanilla sugarSugar stored in a jar with a split vanilla bean, a common way of keeping it. Substitute granulated sugar with a scraped bean or a teaspoon of extract; the recipe specifies only 'a little', so the quantity is to taste.
- "Fry" means sauté down"Fry" means saute down -- The pears go into a wide pan with butter and sugar over brisk heat and cook until tender and the juices are thick and syrupy. A watery filling will soften the shell, so drive off the liquid before filling the mould.
- Fifteen pearsA large quantity by modern standards. Quartered and cooked down, they will fill a domestic mould well over; halve the quantity for a smaller dish.
- Masking with apricot jamReduce apricot jam with a spoonful of water, then push it through a sieve to remove skins. Brush it over the hot unmoulded charlotte; it sets to a lacquer as it cools slightly.
- Unmoulding and servingThe recipe turns it out at once onto a warmed dish; a short rest helps the shell firm before inverting. It will serve roughly 8 to 10, and should be cut and eaten hot.
Charlottes are generally traced to late eighteenth-century England, where the fruit version was built in a mould lined with buttered bread and served hot; the cold cousin lined with ladyfingers and filled with bavarian cream is the charlotte russe, credited by tradition to Careme. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms at the turn of the twentieth century, both forms were fixtures of the hotel dessert repertoire. Apple was the usual fruit; pear, as here, was an autumn variation. The heart-shaped cutter for the base rosette shows on top once the mould is turned over.