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Charlotte Russe
Mrs. A. M. Gibbs.
Whip one quart rich cream to a stiff froth, and drain well on a nice sieve. To one scant pint of milk add six eggs beaten very light; make very sweet; flavour high with vanilla. Cook over hot water till it is a thick custard. Soak one full ounce Coxe's gelatine in a very little water, and warm over hot water. When the custard is very cold, beat in lightly the gelatine and the whipped cream. Line the bottom of your mould with buttered paper, the sides with sponge cake or lady-fingers fastened together with the white of an egg. Fill with the cream, put in a cold place or in summer on ice. To turn out, dip the mould for a moment in hot water. In draining the whipped cream, all that drips through can be rewhipped.
A classic moulded charlotte: a vanilla custard lightened with whipped cream, set with gelatine and cased in sponge. Two things decide whether it works — the temperature of the custard when the gelatine goes in, and how much gelatine you actually use.
- The hinge: temperature when combining"Very cold" custard plus warm gelatine sets in threads before it disperses. Cool the custard to just below room temperature, stir a spoonful of it into the melted gelatine to slacken it, then return that mixture to the bowl and fold in the cream at once. If the custard is fridge-cold you will get rubbery strings through the finished cream.
- Coxe's gelatine, one ounceCox's was a Scottish gelatine, sold in sheets and widely available in North America; period gelatines were less consistently graded than modern product, though their setting strength is hard to pin down now. One ounce of today's powdered gelatine is four envelopes, which would set this stiff enough to slice like cheese. Two to two and a half envelopes (about half an ounce) is closer to right for a base of this size.
- Cooking the custardSix eggs to a scant pint of milk is a very rich base. Over simmering water, stir until it coats the back of a spoon, around 175F. Past 180F it curdles, and there is no starch here to protect it.
- "Make very sweet"No quantity is given. Three-quarters of a cup of sugar in the custard suits modern palates; the cream is left unsweetened, so the sweetness has to carry the whole mould.
- Draining the whipped creamNineteenth-century cream was hand-skimmed and variable, and whipping it threw off liquid that had to be drained away. Pasteurized heavy cream at 36 percent fat barely weeps at all. Whip to soft-to-medium peaks and skip the sieve; the rewhipping instruction is left over from a different dairy.
- Buttered paper and the mouldThe modern equivalent of buttered paper is parchment. Use a charlotte mould, souffle dish or straight-sided cake tin of at least two quarts, and expect the filled mixture to run closer to three once a whipped quart of cream is folded in; line the base with a parchment round and stand the ladyfingers upright against the sides. Egg white as glue works but a thin smear of jam holds better and is not raw.
- Setting and turning outFour to six hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. The hot-water dip should be genuinely momentary — five seconds — or the outer half-inch slumps as it comes free.
- YieldTen to twelve servings, depending on the size of the mould. It does not keep well past a day; the sponge softens into the cream.
The charlotte russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême, who is said to have renamed an earlier baked apple charlotte in honour of the Russian court he cooked for, swapping the hot fruit for cold bavarian cream in a ladyfinger case. By the 1870s it was widely served as a showpiece dessert, which is exactly why it turns up here under a contributor's name: The Home Cook Book was a community-compiled charity cookbook, and its recipes were collected from the women who actually made them. The reliance on a named brand — Coxe's gelatine — marks the period precisely. Before packaged gelatine, a charlotte generally depended on boiling down calves' feet for stock or on isinglass; the appearance of a consistent commercial product over the course of the nineteenth century is what moved moulded creams from the professional kitchen into the household repertoire, and it may be that cooks specified brands because strength varied so much between them.