A charlotte is a dessert where a mold is lined with sponge cake, cookies, or bread and then filled with fruit puree or custard and then topped with more cake. It is related to the trifle, but there the cake is layered with the custard or gelatinized fruit. Both trifles can be found in 17th century cookbooks, but the origin of the charlotte is more obscure with some deriving it from the Old English charlyt, a dish of custard, while others say the name comes from George III's Queen Charlotte. The great French chef Marie Antoine Carême alleged to have invented the charlotte russe, made from ladyfingers and custard, for his employer Czar Alexander I. Russe is French for Russian. Carême had worked for Napoleon, Talleyrand, and King George IV of England before agreeing to go to St. Petersburg to serve the Czar. It is said he spent so little time there before returning to Paris that he never prepared a meal for Alexander so the charlotte russe is the one outstanding monument to the great chef's Russian adventure. Perhaps a more important result of the trip is his replacement of the old "service á la française" where all dishes in a meal came out at once with the new "service á la russe" where the dishes were served in order as they are today. Of course, as with so much of food history, he is also called a diehard supporter of the old method of service!
A corrupted American version of this dessert was popular in big cities in the thirties and forties. There a square of sponge cake was topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherries and sometimes chocolate jimmies (is it political correct to use jimmies or should I say sprinkles? ). It was served in a cardboard container that could be pushed up from the bottom as you ate it. Sounds perfectly awful to me, but it was very popular.
Below is a recipe from 1894 used at Delmonico's restaurant. Delmonico's was the most popular restaurant in New York during the Gilded Age so it is likely that an Easton Ames or two dined there.
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