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Charlotte, Genoise
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a copper basin, add four ounces powdered sugar and half teaspoon vanilla essence. Place the bottom of the basin in a pail with lukewarm water and briskly whisk up for fifteen minutes; remove the basin from the pail, add four ounces flour, gently mix with a skimmer for one minute, add two ounces melted butter and gently and carefully mix for half minute. Lightly butter six individual pudding moulds. Fill them up to three-quarters of their height with the preparation, place on a tin and set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove and let cool off. With a scoop empty the middle of each charlotte, then fill up the cavity with a whipped cream. Unmould on a dish, decorate with the balance of the cream and six candied cherries one on each pudding, and serve.
This is a génoise batter — whole eggs whisked warm with sugar, no chemical leavening — baked in individual moulds and hollowed out for cream. The whisking is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: the warm whiskFifteen minutes of hand whisking over lukewarm water is what makes this rise; there is no baking powder. A stand mixer on high needs about 6-8 minutes, until the mixture triples and a ribbon drawn from the whisk holds on the surface for several seconds before sinking.
- Copper basin, pail of waterCopper bowls were prized for whisking eggs, though the documented volume effect is for whites rather than a warm whole-egg foam; any wide stainless or glass bowl works. The "pail with lukewarm water" is a gentle bain-marie — warm to the finger, never hot enough to set the eggs.
- Weights, not cupsFour ounces of powdered sugar is 115 g; four ounces of flour is 115 g (about 1 cup, spooned and levelled); two ounces of butter is 55 g. Eight eggs is roughly 400 g of egg, about eight large eggs today.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" meant finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster sugar is the closest match and dissolves properly during the whisk.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 350F for the stated twenty minutes; the cakes should spring back and pull slightly from the mould sides. Size the moulds to the batter you actually have, filling each three-quarters as directed, to get six.
- Folding"Gently mix with a skimmer" means fold with a broad perforated implement — a large flat spatula is the modern equivalent. Sift the flour over the surface in two additions, and stir a spoonful of the batter into the melted butter before folding it back, or the butter sinks and deflates the foam.
- MouldsButter and then flour the moulds, or line the bases with paper. Génoise sticks readily, and these must come out whole to be hollowed and filled.
- The creamWhip heavy cream to soft peaks with a little sugar and vanilla and fill only once the cakes are fully cold. Assembled, they hold a few hours refrigerated at most before the cream weeps into the crumb.
Génoise takes its name, by traditional account, from Genoa and is often said to derive from Italian pastry work that entered French kitchens in the eighteenth century; it is raised by egg alone and so keeps a fine, close crumb that slices and soaks well. The "charlotte" here is a loose use of the word — a true charlotte is a mould lined with bread or ladyfingers and filled — but the term appears to have been used more broadly, and hollowing a small cake to hold whipped cream turns one batter into a plated sweet. The instructions to crack the eggs "carefully" into a copper basin and work with a skimmer are the vocabulary of the professional pastry station rather than the home cook.