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Charlotte Russe
Whip one pint of cream, flavored, to a stiff froth and add to it the well beaten whites of two eggs and one-half pound of pulverized sugar; mix it all lightly and carefully together. Fill the charlotte pan or pans and put them in the ice chest to set. Spread the cake over the sheet as evenly as possible. When baked, an oval piece is cut to fit the bottom of the charlotte pan, then even sized parallelograms are cut to fit around the sides.
This is an uncooked cream filling stiffened with raw egg white and chilled, which is where it runs into trouble today. The notes below explain the problem and decode the period language.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites of two eggs are beaten and folded into cold cream, and nothing in the method brings the mixture above refrigerator temperature at any point. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that chilling does not reduce, and the finished charlotte is served straight from the cold box. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- Nothing sets it but coldThere is no gelatin, no custard base and no starch here — the structure depends entirely on stiffly whipped cream holding air against a sheet of cake. It relies on hard, sustained chilling, and in a modern refrigerator a cream-only filling of this kind may slacken and weep, softening the cake walls.
- Pulverized sugarHalf a pound of pulverized sugar is what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar, roughly two cups. Period pulverized sugar was ground without the cornstarch added to modern boxes, so the two are not quite interchangeable in texture.
- The ice chestAn ice chest was an insulated wooden cabinet cooled by a block of ice, typically holding somewhere in the mid-30s Fahrenheit near the ice and considerably warmer at the far end. "Put them in the ice chest to set" assumes hours of hard chilling, not a quick rest.
- "Flavored" creamThe original does not say what the cream is flavoured with, or how much. Vanilla, sherry, maraschino and rosewater all appear as flavourings for whipped cream in cookery of this period, but the text itself gives no guidance.
- The cake shellThe last two sentences describe lining the mould with cake baked flat in a sheet, cut to an oval for the base and into matching parallelograms for the sides. This is the alternative to the more familiar ladyfinger lining, and it produces a seamless wall — but it also means the cake is in direct contact with the uncooked filling for the whole chilling period.
Charlotte russe is generally traced to the French kitchens of the early nineteenth century and is often attributed to Antonin Carême, who is said to have named it for a Russian patron or for the Tsar; the older plain charlotte, a hot moulded pudding of buttered bread and fruit, was already English by the late 1700s, and the russe version turned it into a cold dish of cream inside a case of sponge. By 1900 it was a familiar fixture of American party cookery — a dessert that could be assembled ahead, kept in the ice chest and turned out whole at table, which is exactly the sort of showpiece a household manual of this period expected its readers to produce.