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Charlotte Plombiere
Prepare the same amount of lady-fingers and with them carefully line the bottom and sides of a plain quart pudding mould, then fill up the mould with a vanilla ice cream. Unmould on a cold dish, decorate the top and all around with a half pint whipped cream and serve.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one: a charlotte mould lined with ladyfingers and filled with ice cream, turned out and dressed with whipped cream. Everything hinges on keeping it cold enough to hold its shape while you work.
- "The same amount of lady-fingers"The phrase gives no quantity on its own and presumably refers back to another charlotte recipe in the book. For a quart mould, figure roughly 18 to 24 ladyfingers, some trimmed to wedges for the bottom.
- A quart "plain" mouldPlain means smooth-sided rather than fluted or patterned: a straight or slightly tapered charlotte tin, or a 1-quart pudding basin or loaf pan. Fluting makes it harder to fit the ladyfingers tightly against the wall.
- Lining the mouldCut the ladyfingers to the exact height of the tin and stand them upright, flat sides inward, packed tight with no gaps; fill the base with trimmed pieces fitted like a mosaic. Line a chilled mould, not a warm one.
- Soften, don't meltThe ice cream should be the texture of thick frosting so it packs into the corners without air pockets. Let a quart sit out 10 to 15 minutes, work it smooth with a spatula, then press it in firmly.
- Freeze before unmouldingThe recipe gives no chilling time, but with modern hard-frozen ice cream the assembled charlotte is best returned to the freezer for at least four hours, ideally overnight, or the walls may bow when you turn it out.
- Unmoulding on a cold dishThe recipe calls for a cold dish, so chill the serving plate well beforehand. Wrap the mould briefly in a warm damp cloth or dip it a few seconds in warm water, invert, and lift the tin straight up.
- Half a pint of whipped creamMost simply read as a cup (half pint) of heavy cream, which whips up to roughly two cups; the wording could also mean half a pint measured after whipping. Sweeten lightly; the ladyfingers and ice cream are already sweet.
- Yield and timingA quart mould serves six to eight. Decorate at the last moment and serve at once; once cut, the ladyfingers soften quickly and the piped cream slumps.
Plombière or glace plombières is a French ice cream, generally traced to the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges, though the connection is traditional rather than documented; by the nineteenth century the name attached to a rich custard ice, often with kirsch and candied fruit, and then loosely to almost any moulded ice cream dessert. Grafting it onto a charlotte — the ladyfinger-lined mould made famous as charlotte russe, traditionally attributed to Carême in the early nineteenth century — gave hotel kitchens a showpiece that could be built ahead, held in the ice chest, and turned out in seconds during service. Its presence in a professional collection of this kind reflects how thoroughly the French restaurant repertoire had become the common language of American hotel and household cookery, and how much such a dessert depended on reliable refrigeration.