There is some doubt about the tradition of the ‘charlotte’, for which a special ‘charlotte mould’ was used in great kitchens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the name ‘charlet’ (also ‘charlette’) appears in several fifteenth-century recipes. There is ‘charlet enforsed’ and ‘charlet a-forcyd ryally’ in the Harleian MSS.

The recipes are always for pork or veal, chopped small and cooked in milk: in fact, the dish was simply chair = flesh, laitée = milked: i.e