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Apple Charlotte
1 tablespoonful gelatine 3 tablespoonfuls cold water + cup sugar ½ cup strained apple + cup boiling water sauce 1 tablespoonful lemonjuice 1 cup whipped cream Soak gelatine in cold, dissolve in boiling, water.
Add sugar, lemon-juice, and apple sauce (more sugar if the apple sauce is not sweet), and set in cool place to stiffen. When it is thoroughly chilled and begins to harden around the edges, beat with a Dover beater, adding gradually the whipped cream. When stiff enough to drop, pour into mold and chill. The whites of two eggs beaten stiff may be used instead of cream, and the charlotte served with soft custard. Blackberry Jelly (with Gelatine) cup blackberry-juice 1 tablespoonful lemonand pulp strainjuice ed from stewed cup boiling water blackberries tablespoonful gelatine Soak gelatine in two tablespoonfuls cold water; when softened dissolve in boiling water; add sugar if necessary, hot blackberry-pulp, and lemon-juice.
Mix, pour into bowl or mold, and set in cool place to form. Serve with sugar and cream.
1 pint stewed blue- tablespoonful gela-
A cold gelatine dessert built on leftover apple sauce, whipped to a foam rather than set solid. The whole thing turns on catching the gelatine at the right moment.
- The hinge: beat at the syrupy stageThe mixture must be chilled until it thickens to unbeaten egg white and just begins to set at the rim, then beaten at once. Too soon and the cream sinks out; too late and it breaks into lumps that will not smooth again.
- Gelatine measureOne tablespoon of granulated gelatine is somewhat more than a standard modern envelope (an envelope runs about 7 g, or 2¼ teaspoons), which is ample for the soft set wanted here. Soak it in the cold water until spongy before adding the boiling water, and stir until no grains remain on the spoon.
- Missing quantitiesThe sugar and boiling-water amounts have lost their fractions in this printing and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Work from the half cup of apple sauce and the tablespoon of gelatine, and sweeten by taste as the recipe itself directs.
- Dover beaterA hand-cranked rotary egg beater. A hand mixer on medium does the same job; a stand mixer may be unwieldy for so small a volume.
- Whipping the creamWhip to soft peaks only, before folding or beating it in. Cream taken to stiff peaks will not incorporate evenly into the setting gelatine and leaves white streaks.
- The egg-white variantThe alternative finish uses raw beaten whites that are never cooked. If you make that version, use pasteurised whites, and note that it sets softer and weeps faster than the cream version.
- Mold and unmoldingRinse the mold with cold water before filling so the set charlotte releases. Chill at least four hours; dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a cold plate.
- YieldPerhaps three cups of finished mixture once beaten, enough for about four; being a foam, it is likely to be at its best the day it is made.
A charlotte proper is a molded pudding lined with bread or sponge fingers, its name often traced, though never firmly documented, to one or another Charlotte or to the charlotte bonnet; the apple version baked in a bread crust is the older form. What appears here is the later, lighter descendant, in which gelatine and whipped cream replace both the lining and the baking, a style that spread quickly once packaged granulated gelatine became a cheap pantry staple in American kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century. Thrift is the point: half a cup of apple sauce from an earlier meal is stretched into a company dessert, and the same formula is applied down the page to any stewed fruit on hand. The Dover beater named in the instructions was the standard American rotary egg beater of the period, common enough that cookbooks used the brand as a generic term.