Name: Pie-plant Charlotte
Ingredients: 1 pound pie-plant, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces; 1 pound sugar; Bread crumbs; Butter

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pie-plant Charlotte

Ingredients

1 pound pie-plant, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 pound sugar
Bread crumbs
Butter

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).
Butter a baking dish.

Assemble

Layer bread crumbs in the dish, followed by a layer of pie-plant covered with sugar.
Repeat layers until the dish is filled, finishing with a layer of bread crumbs dotted with small bits of butter.

Bake and serve

Bake for 1.5 hours.
Serve lukewarm with boiled custard poured around it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pie-plant: Supplies the tart flavor and moisture that softens into the filling as it bakes.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart pie-plant and draws out its juices as it sits.
Bread crumbs: Soak up the released juices and hold the layers together in the dish.
Butter: Adds richness and helps the top crumbs brown in the oven.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.