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Charlotte
Mrs. W. W. Kimball.
One quart rich cream, three tablespoons of Madeira wine, whites of two eggs beaten to a stiff froth, one teacup of powdered sugar, half a box of gelatine dissolved in half a cup of sweet milk; flavour with vanilla; beat the cream and wine together; add the eggs, then the sugar, and last, the gelatine.
This is a Charlotte Russe filling — a cold, unbaked cream set with gelatine — and it depends on raw egg white that is never heated at any point in the process.
- The whites are never cookedTwo egg whites are beaten to a froth and combined with cold cream, and the mixture is only set by the gelatine. Nothing in the method brings the eggs anywhere near the temperature at which Salmonella is killed. A current recipe using pasteurised egg product or a cooked meringue base should be used instead.
- The gelatine is also unheatedThe gelatine handling is vague -- The recipe says only that half a box of gelatine is dissolved in half a cup of sweet milk and stirred in last; it gives no temperature, no soaking time, and no indication of how the gelatine is to be brought into the cold cream without setting in strings.
- "Half a box of gelatine" is not a usable quantityBoxed gelatine in the 1870s varied by brand and was sold in sheets, shreds and granules; half a box might mean anything from about half an ounce to a full ounce of dry gelatine. There is no honest conversion to modern quarter-ounce envelopes here.
- A teacup is not a cupA nineteenth-century teacup in these books runs roughly three-quarters of a standard cup, though the books are not consistent about it. Powdered sugar of the period was also loaf sugar crushed and sieved, coarser than modern confectioners' sugar and without cornstarch.
- MadeiraThe wine is doing real work — Madeira was a standard flavouring in American charlottes and trifles, and the fortified sweetness stands up to a quart of cream. It is not, however, present in any quantity that would inhibit bacterial growth.
The charlotte russe is a mould lined with biscuit or sponge and filled with a set cream, generally traced to Antonin Carême in the early nineteenth century, the name usually explained as a French tribute to a Russian patron. By the 1870s it had become one of the standard company desserts of American middle-class households, and its spread owed a great deal to commercially packaged gelatine, which replaced the long labour of boiling down calves' feet or isinglass. That is why a recipe like this one can be so brief: it lists only proportions and the order of combining. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago from contributions by named local women, and Mrs. W. W. Kimball's version is typical of the genre — a signature, a list, and the confident assumption that the reader already knows what a charlotte looks like.