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Pear Charlotte
Lightly butter a plain quart pudding mould. Cover the bottom with a slice of bread quarter of an inch thick. Cut out of an American loaf of bread a piece the height of the mould; pare off all the crust, cut into even slices quarter of an inch thick, then cut each slice into three equal strips lengthwise. Dip each in clarified butter and arrange around the mould, standing up and close to one another.
Peel, cut in halves and remove the seeds from eight fairly good-sized, sound, fresh pears. Place them in a frying pan with an ounce good butter, two ounces granulated sugar and one teaspoon vanilla essence; gently toss for half a minute, then cook for eight minutes. With the aid of a spoon fill the mould with the prepared pears and liquor. Cover the pears tightly with a quarter-inch slice of bread dipped in butter. Should the bread around the mould reach higher than the height of the pears trim off all around. Place the mould in a slow oven for one and a quarter hours. Remove, unmould on a large dish, pour a rum sauce all around the charlotte and serve.
A classic bread-lined fruit charlotte, built like the apple version but with pears. The success or failure of it is decided before it goes in the oven: the fruit must be thick enough to hold its shape when the mould comes off.
- Cook the pears down further than statedEight minutes in the pan is enough for firm apples but rarely for pears, which are wetter and collapse into juice. Cook until the mixture mounds on a spoon and no free liquid pools; a slack filling will burst the bread walls at the unmoulding.
- "Slow oven"Probably around 300F. At that temperature an hour and a quarter should set the fruit, though the bread will stay pale; a short spell in a hotter oven at the end would colour and crisp the crust, but the recipe does not call for it.
- American loafA plain white sandwich loaf with a tight, close crumb, sliced by hand. Modern pre-sliced bread runs closer to half an inch and is too airy; use a day-old unsliced pain de mie and cut your own quarter-inch slices, which stay firm in butter.
- Clarified butterMelted butter with the milk solids and water removed, so the bread fries rather than steams and does not scorch over the long bake. Melt butter gently, skim the foam, pour off the clear fat and discard the milky residue at the bottom.
- Quart mouldRoughly a litre: a charlotte tin, a straight-sided souffle dish or a small deep cake tin will all serve. Straight or slightly flared sides matter more than shape, since the charlotte has to slide out.
- Choosing pearsBosc or Anjou hold up; Bartlett and Comice turn to puree. Eight halves may not fill a quart mould once cooked down, so have a ninth and tenth pear to hand.
- Rest before unmouldingLet it stand ten to fifteen minutes out of the oven so the fruit firms. Turned out straight away it slumps; left to go cold it sticks.
- Rum sauce and yieldNo sauce recipe is given here; a hard sauce thinned with cream, or a creme anglaise with a spoonful of dark rum, both suit. A quart mould would serve roughly six, though the recipe gives no yield.
The charlotte is generally traced to English cookery of the late eighteenth century, a way of turning stale bread and cheap orchard fruit into something worth bringing to table, and it kept its place in French kitchens as the charlotte aux pommes. The cold charlotte russe, a ring of ladyfingers around bavarian cream and usually credited to Careme, later took over the name in most people's minds, but the hot baked version described here is the older idea: buttered bread standing upright as a mould that becomes the crust. Pears are an obvious substitute wherever apples are used. The instruction to cut the lining from "an American loaf" may suggest the book was addressing American readers.