No. 3141

Chateau Framboise

Fasten a round layer of office paste (No. 143) on a dish and on it place a charlotte mold half an inch narrower than the paste. Prepare a cream cake paste (No. 132) with five ounces of butter, three gills of water, seven ounces of flour, a spoonful of sugar, lemon peel, a grain of salt and five eggs. Put this paste into a socket pocket (Fig. 179), and put it on a baking sheet in the shape of thin even eclairs as long as the mold is high; then bake them in a slack oven until dry, then allow to cool. After the cakes are detached from the sheet, keep them warm for a few moments. When cold, open and fill them with raspberry jam (No. 3695) pushed through a cornet, and glaze over with sugar cooked to "crack" (No. 171). As this becomes cold dip one end and one side into the same sugar so as to enable them to stand upright on the layer of office paste around the mold. When the sugar is cold lift out the mold and fill the inside of the case with a raspberry bavarois preparation, the same as for No. 3134, thickened on ice, and lastly having a salpicon of candied pineapple added to it.

← No. 3140 Carolina Border with Champagne Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3142 Charlotte Bengalian →

For the Modern Kitchen

An architectural dessert from Delmonico's: a palisade of glazed choux fingers cemented with hard-crack sugar around a raspberry bavarois. The components are all straightforward; the assembly is where it stands or falls.

The hinge: the sugar is the mortarNothing holds this together but sugar cooked to the crack stage, roughly 300-310F on a thermometer. If it is cooked short it stays tacky and the eclairs slump; if it scorches it tastes bitter and sets too fast to work with. Keep the pan warm over the lowest possible heat while you dip, and work with one finger at a time.
Office paste and cream cake paste"Office paste" (No. 143) is Ranhofer's sweet paste from the pastry office, baked as a flat round to serve as the base plate. "Cream cake paste" (No. 132) is pate a choux: here 5 oz butter, three gills of water (a gill being 4 fl oz, so 1 1/2 cups), 7 oz flour, 5 eggs, plus a spoonful of sugar, lemon peel and a grain of salt.
A slack oven, and why not to take it literallyA slack oven is a cool one -- usually reckoned somewhere around 250-300F, though the book gives no temperatures. Choux piped that thin will not rise properly that cool; modern practice is to set it at 425F until puffed and coloured, then drop to 325-350F to dry out the interior. The original's instruction is really about the drying stage, which is the part that matters here since damp shells collapse under the glaze.
Socket pocketA pastry bag with a plain metal tube. Pipe the fingers to the exact height of your charlotte mold and pipe a few extra, since some will crack when dipped.
The mold is a form, not a bakewareA charlotte mold here is simply a plain straight-sided cylinder used as a mandrel: the mold is half an inch narrower than the pastry round, leaving a rim of exposed paste for the eclairs to stand on. Any straight-sided tin or a cake ring of similar depth will do, and the mold is lifted away once the sugar sets.
Thickened on iceThe bavarois must be stirred over ice until it thickens to a ribbon before it goes into the case. Poured in loose, it will find every gap in the sugar seams and run out onto the dish.
SalpiconA salpicon is simply a fine, even dice, here of candied pineapple. Blot it dry before folding it in so it does not bleed syrup into the cream, and add it at the last moment or it will sink.
Yield and timingAssemble the day it is served: hard-crack sugar turns sticky and cloudy within hours in a humid kitchen, and refrigeration hastens that.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows exactly how that kitchen worked: nearly every element is a cross-reference to another number in the book, so the dessert is assembled from standing preparations rather than made from scratch. The case is built from pastry rather than the ladyfingers of a classic charlotte russe, and the grand name -- chateau -- is of a piece with the nineteenth-century pastry cook's ambition to build rather than merely to mold.