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Peach Charlotte Russe
The peach charlotte makes a delicious as well as a pretty dessert for a luncheon or dinner. For a family of four or five persons, soak one-quarter of a box of gelatine in onefourth cupful of water. Dissolve this in an equal amount of boiling water and add to it one cupful of granulated sugar, the juice of half a lemon and one cupful of peach pulp. Place it on the ice to chill, then fold in lightly the stiffly beaten whites of three eggs. Turn it into a mold. When ready to serve decorate it with chilled peaches.
The structure of this dessert depends entirely on raw egg white, which is never heated at any point — that is the problem with it today. The notes below explain the failure and decode the period measurements.
- The raw egg white is the whole issueThree stiffly beaten whites are folded into a chilled gelatine base and set on ice. Nothing in the method brings the eggs anywhere near 160F, and the mixture then sits at refrigerator temperature for hours while it sets. Salmonella in shell eggs is a live risk, and the whites here are the aerating structure, not an incidental ingredient.
- Cold does not make it safeChilling slows bacterial growth but kills nothing. Period recipes of this kind routinely relied on a long stay "on the ice," and that is not a safeguard. If you want a peach charlotte russe, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or a cooked meringue base.
- A box of gelatinePeriod boxes are generally taken to have held about an ounce, so a quarter box is roughly 1/4 oz — close to one modern envelope of powdered gelatine, about 2 1/4 teaspoons. Box sizes were not standardised, so treat this as an approximation.
- Peach pulpThis means ripe peaches skinned, stoned and rubbed through a sieve, not tinned purée in syrup. The cupful of sugar is calibrated to fresh fruit and would be punishing with anything pre-sweetened.
- Not actually a charlotte russeA true charlotte russe is lined with ladyfingers or sponge. This one is a moulded fruit gelatine set in a plain mould and decorated with chilled peaches; the recipe text itself calls it simply a peach charlotte.
- YieldThe headnote says four or five persons; the beaten whites add considerable volume to the fruit and gelatine base, but the recipe gives no mould size.
Gelatine desserts moved from luxury to weeknight between roughly 1850 and 1900. Earlier cooks made their own jelly by boiling calves' feet or isinglass for hours and clarifying the result; commercial granulated and sheet gelatine removed that labour and put moulded creams and charlottes within reach of a household with one servant or none. American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are thick with them: Bavarians, Spanish creams, snow puddings, fruit sponges — and here: bloom the gelatine, dissolve, sweeten, acidulate with lemon, add flavour, chill to the point of thickening, fold in beaten whites or whipped cream, mould. The name charlotte russe attached itself loosely to a range of moulded cold sweets by this date, whether or not they carried the sponge lining that originally defined the dish. Uncooked whites were commonly used and rarely remarked upon; the connection between eggs and salmonellosis was not established until well into the twentieth century.