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Coffee Charlotte Russe (Way of making a delicious)
A way of making a delicious coffee charlotte which has a very delicate flavor is as follows: Grind rather coarsely a quarter of a pound of freshly roasted coffee. Throw it into a pint of boiling hot cream. Set the cream on the back part of the fire where the coffee will infuse through it for about an hour. It must not boil, however. At the end of the hour, strain it, add the beaten yolks of four eggs, an half ounce of gelatine dissolved in a little cold water and half a cupful of sugar. Stir the mixture over the fire until the gelatine is thoroughly melted and the eggs begin to thicken. This part of the process should be done in a double boiler. As soon as this custard is done, set it in a pan of ice and continue beating until it is thoroughly chilled and begins to thicken. Then add instantly a quart of dry whipped cream.
A cold gelatin cream set in a mold, in the style that filled dessert menus around 1900. The original assumes you know what a charlotte russe is, so it leaves out the mold, the ladyfingers and the chilling time entirely.
- The hinge: never let the cream boilThe recipe is explicit on this point; boiled cream can curdle, and a long hot infusion pushed to a simmer tends to turn harsh. "The back part of the fire" means the coolest spot on the range — keep the cream hot but well below a simmer, in the region of 150-160F, for the hour.
- The coffeeA quarter pound is about 115 g of coarsely ground beans to a pint (2 cups) of cream. That is a very heavy dose, but most of it is strained out; the cream absorbs a fraction. Strain through a fine sieve lined with a double thickness of cheesecloth, and press gently rather than wringing, or you carry through sediment.
- GelatineHalf an ounce is roughly 14 g, or two standard envelopes of modern powdered gelatin. Nineteenth-century sheet and shred gelatins varied in strength, so if using leaf, weigh to 14 g of a mid-strength grade. Bloom it in a few tablespoons of cold water for five minutes before it goes into the hot custard.
- Cooking the custardFour yolks in a pint of cream sets at about 170-175F — thick enough to coat a spoon and hold a line drawn by a finger. The double boiler the recipe calls for is not optional at this ratio.
- "Dry whipped cream"This means cream beaten stiff and drained of any loose liquid, not cream whipped to soft peaks. The quart is most likely the whipped volume, which would come from roughly 2 cups of heavy cream, though the text does not say whether it is measured before or after whipping. Fold it in the moment the custard begins to thicken over ice; once the gelatin sets, the mixture will not take air.
- What the recipe leaves outA charlotte russe is poured into a mold lined with ladyfingers or strips of sponge cake, standing upright around the sides. Chill at least four hours, preferably overnight, then dip the mold briefly in warm water to unmold.
- YieldAbout 1.5 quarts of finished mixture — enough to fill a 2-quart charlotte mold, serving ten to twelve, or eight to ten individual ramekins.
The charlotte russe is generally traced to Antonin Carême, who is said to have renamed his charlotte à la parisienne in honor of Tsar Alexander I; whatever the truth of that story, the form — a ladyfinger-lined mold filled with bavarian cream — was firmly established in French practice by the mid-nineteenth century and reached American cookbooks as the standard company dessert. By the time this book was compiled it had become thoroughly domestic, and in New York it had even escaped the mold entirely, sold from bakery windows as a paper collar of sponge cake topped with whipped cream. The coffee version here belongs to a period when freshly roasted beans were ground at home and infused directly into dairy rather than brewed first, a technique said by some to give a rounder, less acidic flavor than stirring coffee extract into cream, and one that asks only for low, steady heat, so that a pan can sit for an hour without ever coming to a simmer.