Olivier Poels 5:40 p.m., January 3, 2022
Here is a dessert that can be adapted to all seasons; you can play with all the fruits as you wish. The dish was created at the beginning of the 19th century for the very popular Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, King of England. The first recipe is quite basic, it is a composition based on buttered sandwich bread and jam, all placed in a high and flared mold and cooked for a long time (a kind of pudding, in fact).
At the time, it was tasted hot.
It is the great cook Antonin Carême who modifies it, while he works in London in the kitchens of the future King George IV.
He replaces the white bread with spoon cookies and the jam with Bavarian cream.
He serves this cold dessert and calls it "charlotte à la parisienne".
Lent then worked on behalf of Tsar Alexander, he took his recipe with him and called it "Russian charlotte"!
It is under this name that it is still known today by pastry chefs.
The “old-fashioned” charlotte recipe:
Ingredients:
- 1.5 kg of apples
- 250 gr of butter
- 80 gr of sugar
- 2 sachets of vanilla sugar
- 1 brioche sandwich bread (if possible a little stale)
- 50 cl of milk
1. Butter a charlotte mold
2. Peel and cut the apples and rings
3. Cook them gently in 150 g of butter with 40 g of sugar and the vanilla sugar (the compote must be dry and smooth)
4. Dip the slices of bread in the milk then fry them in butter with the rest of the sugar.
5. Line the edges of the mold with slices of bread and garnish by alternating layers of compote and bread
6. Bake 25 min at 150 ° in a bain-marie and unmold