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Charlotte-Russe (One ounce gelatine dissolved)
One ounce gelatine dissolved in two gills of boiling milk, whites of four eggs beaten to a stiff froth, one and a half cups white powdered sugar, one pint thick cream whipped to a froth, and rose-water or vanilla for flavoring; line a large mold with thick slices of spongecake, mix the gelatine, sugar, cream and flavoring together, add lightly the frothed whites of the eggs, pour into mold, set away on ice till required for use. This is an easy and excellent mode of making this most delicate dessert. - Mrs. V. G. Hush
The vessels and units here are easy enough to translate, but the structure of the dessert is not: the beaten egg whites go in raw and the mixture is only chilled, never cooked.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe gelatine is bloomed in boiling milk, but that liquid is mixed with sugar and a pint of cold whipped cream long before the whites are folded in, so the whites never approach a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The finished charlotte sits on ice until served, which preserves the risk rather than reducing it. Use a current recipe if you want to make a charlotte russe.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of milk is one cup — a small amount of liquid for the quantity of gelatine specified.
- One ounce of gelatineAn ounce is roughly four envelopes of modern powdered gelatine, a very firm set by present standards. Nineteenth-century sheet and shred gelatines varied widely in strength, so the weight is not directly comparable to what is on a supermarket shelf.
- White powdered sugarIn period usage this generally meant finely ground sugar, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch.
- Thick creamCream called "thick" in this period was unhomogenized and generally richer than modern whipping cream labeled 36 percent; treat it as nearer heavy or double cream, though fat content was not standardized and cannot be pinned to a figure.
- "Set away on ice"This is the ice-cooled storage of the period — a chest chilled by a block of ice, which would generally have run warmer and less steadily than a modern refrigerator.
- The moldA "large mold" here suggests a charlotte mold or straight-sided dish of at least two quarts, lined with sponge cake slices that stand upright against the walls; the recipe gives no dimensions.
Charlotte russe — sponge cake or ladyfingers lining a mold filled with a cold cream — is generally traced to the pastry chef Antonin Carême, who is said to have named the "Russian charlotte" during his service to Tsar Alexander I, distinguishing it from the older hot apple charlotte baked in bread. By the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled the dish was a familiar company dessert in American cookbooks, which often print more than one version of it, some set with gelatine, some with nothing but stiffly whipped cream. Gelatine versions like this one belong to the period when packaged sheet and shred gelatine was becoming widely available, sparing the cook the long labor of boiling down calves' feet; the contributor's claim that this is "an easy and excellent mode" is a claim about that convenience. The reliance on a supply of ice also places it, since the dessert had to be kept cold until served.