Skip to main content
Dessert

Pie-plant Charlotte

A baked dessert made with pie-plant, sugar, bread crumbs, and butter, served lukewarm with boiled custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

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

  1. Peel the pie-plant and cut it into 1-inch pieces.

  2. Butter a baking dish and add a layer of bread crumbs.

Assemble

  1. Add a layer of pie-plant and cover it with sugar.

  2. Repeat layers until the dish is filled, finishing with a layer of bread crumbs dotted with butter.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1.5 hours.

  2. 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.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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
Forms the tart fruit filling that softens and becomes moist as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the pie-plant and draws out its juices as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the fruit juices and give the charlotte a soft, structured body.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top layer of crumbs brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Layering the pie-plant and sugar. Filling the dish evenly with layers of fruit, sugar and crumbs helps the charlotte hold its shape and cook through without pockets of raw fruit or soggy, collapsed sections.

“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.

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesBrown Bread PuddingBrown Bread Pudding47 recipes