A charlotte is a type of

bread pudding Bread pudding is a bread-based dessert popular in many countries' cuisines. It is made with stale bread and milk or cream, generally containing eggs, a form of fat such as oil, butter or suet and, depending on whether the pudding is sweet or ...

that can be served hot or cold. It is also referred to as an "

icebox cake An icebox cake (also known as a chocolate ripple cake or log in Australia) is a dairy-based dessert made with cream, fruits, nuts, and wafers and set in the refrigerator. One particularly well-known version is the back-of-the-box recipe on thin ...

". Bread,

sponge cake Sponge cake is a light cake made with egg whites, flour and sugar, sometimes leavened with baking powder. Some sponge cakes do not contain egg yolks, like angel food cake, but most of them do. Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated ...

, crumbs or biscuits/ cookies are used to line a mold, which is then filled with a

fruit In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants (also known as angiosperms) disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits in particu ...

puree or custard. The baked pudding could then be sprinkled with powdered sugar and glazed with a

salamander Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All t ...

, a red-hot iron plate attached to a long handle, though modern recipes would likely use more practical tools to achieve a similar effect. The variant Charlotte russe uses a mold lined with ladyfingers and filled with

Bavarian cream Bavarian cream, crème bavaroise or simply bavarois is a dessert consisting of milk thickened with eggs and gelatin or isinglass, into which whipped cream is folded. The mixture sets up in a cold mold and is unmolded for serving. Earlier versions ...

. Classically, stale bread dipped in butter was used as the lining, but sponge cake or ladyfingers may be used today. The filling may be covered with a thin layer of similarly flavoured gelatin.

History

In 1815,

Marie-Antoine Carême Marie Antoine (Antonin) Carême (; 8 June 178412 January 1833) was a French chef and an early practitioner and exponent of the elaborate style of cooking known as ''grande cuisine'', the "high art" of French cooking: a grandiose style of cookery ...

claims to have thought of ''charlotte à la parisienne'' "", presumably in 1803, when he opened his own pastry shop. The earliest known English recipe is from the 1808 London edition of

Maria Rundell Maria Eliza Rundell (née Ketelby; 1745 – 16 December 1828) was an English writer. Little is known about most of her life, but in 1805, when she was over 60, she sent an unedited collection of recipes and household advice to John Murray, of ...

's '' New System of Domestic Cookery'':

Cut as many very thin slices of white bread as will cover the bottom and line the sides of a baking dish, but first rub it thick with butter. Put apples, in thin slices, into the dish, in layers, till full, strewing sugar between, and bits of butter. In the mean time, soak as many thin slices of bread as will cover the whole, in warm milk, over which lay a plate, and a weight to keep the bread close on the apples. Bake slowly three hours. To a middling sized dish use half a pound of butter in the whole.

In Carême's 1815 ''Le Pâtissier royal parisien'', he mentions many varieties of charlotte: ; he mentions as the name used by others for what he called .

, ''Le Pâtissier royal parisien'', 1815
full text
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Types

There are many variants. Most charlottes are served cool, so they are more common in warmer seasons. Fruit charlottes usually combine a fruit purée or preserve, like raspberry or pear, with a custard filling or

whipped cream Whipped cream is liquid heavy cream that is whipped by a whisk or mixer until it is light and fluffy and holds its shape, or by the expansion of dissolved gas, forming a firm colloid. It is often sweetened, typically with white sugar, an ...

. Charlottes are not always made with fruit; some, notably charlotte russe, use custard or

, and a

chocolate Chocolate is a food made from roasted and ground cacao seed kernels that is available as a liquid, solid, or paste, either on its own or as a flavoring agent in other foods. Cacao has been consumed in some form since at least the Olmec civ ...

charlotte is made with layers of chocolate mousse filling. The ''Algerian charlotte'' is made with

honey Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies. Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions of plants (primar ...

dates Date or dates may refer to: *Date (fruit), the fruit of the date palm (''Phoenix dactylifera'') Social activity *Dating, a form of courtship involving social activity, with the aim of assessing a potential partner **Group dating * Play date, a ...

, orange rind, and almonds. The 19th-century Russian ''sharlotka'' is a baked pudding with layers of brown bread and apple sauce, and has since evolved into a simple dessert of chopped apples basked in a sweet batter.

Charlotte russe

or is a cold dessert of

set in a

mold A mold () or mould () is one of the structures certain fungi can form. The dust-like, colored appearance of molds is due to the formation of spores containing fungal secondary metabolites. The spores are the dispersal units of the fungi. Not ...

lined with ladyfingers. A simplified version of charlotte russe was a popular dessert or on-the-go treat sold in candy stores and luncheonettes in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. It consisted of a paper cup filled with yellow cake and whipped cream topped with half a maraschino cherry. The bottom of the cup is pushed up to eat. Charlotte royale is made with the same filling as a Charlotte russe, but the ladyfingers are replaced by slices of Swiss roll.

Etymology

The earliest attestation of "charlotte" is in a New York magazine in 1796.''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a co ...

'', 188
''s.v.''
/ref> Its origins are unclear. It may come from the woman's name. One etymology suggests it is a corruption of the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

word , a kind of custard, or ''charlets'', a meat dish. It is often claimed that Carême named it charlotte after one of the various foreign royals he served, but the name appears years earlier. Carême's preferred name for was , and he says (in 1815) that "others" prefer to call it , so it is unlikely that he named it ''russe'' for Czar Alexander I as has been proposed.

References

External links