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OK, I’m going to confess to a bit of cultural prejudice today. If I were going to be stranded on a deserted island and I could take along my three favorite desserts, they would all be French. So it’s probably no surprise that my favorite Russian dessert is one that was created by a French pastry chef.
The dessert is Charlotte Russe, and it was whipped up by Marie-Antoine Carême for Russia’s Tsar Alexander I in the early 1800s. Wikipedia, citing a 2004 feature on Carême by National Public Radio, calls Carême the “first celebrity chef”. That’s not such a bad description considering that, just like Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay and Mario Batali today (yes, I watch way too many Food Network shows), Carême cooked for many of the most important people of his day.
And a Charlotte Russe is one of those things that could only have been devised by a chef with a battery of assistants at his side. To make it, you have to stack fussy, fragile ladyfingers on their ends around the side of a springform pan. You have to separate a whole mess of eggs to make a custard known as Bavarian cream. Then the cream, laced with Cognac, gets layered inside the ladyfinger ring with raspberries or strawberries and whipped cream. I don’t believe I have ever eaten a Charlotte Russe in Russia, but I was usually so jet-lagged in Russia that I don’t know that I accurately remember my meals.
Wikipedia says there’s a question as to whom Carême’s Charlotte was, or if the dish was even named for a person. And there are no clues in “Please To The Table”, my key reference to Russian food. There are a few serviceable recipes for Charlotte Russe on the Food Network Web site, including this one by Paula Deen and this one by Emeril Lagasse, neither of which–inexplicably to my way of thinking–uses Grand Marnier.
But all of them are going to go sailing right over the heads of your kids, whether they were adopted from Russia or not. If you wanted to get the biggest bang for your cooking buck, try this ice cream cake recipe from Family Circle. It is very definitely inspired by a Charlotte Russe, but it substitutes ice cream sandwiches for the ladyfingers and three different kinds of ice cream for the Bavarian cream. I made it for my Vladivostok-born older son’s birthday this summer, and it was a big hit.
Apologies, monsieur Carême.
Image credit: hotblack at Morguefile.com
