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Dessert

Charlotte De Pommes

A baked apple charlotte with buttered bread base and apricot jam glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Charlotte De Pommes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel and slice the apples.

  2. Sauté the sliced apples in a pan with butter and powdered sugar until cooked.

Line the mold

  1. Line a charlotte mold with slices of white bread.

  2. Cut heart-shaped croutons from the bread for the base.

  3. Soak the croutons in melted butter and place one in the center.

  4. Arrange the croutons with points facing the center, overlapping them against the sides of the mold.

  5. Cut strips of bread the height of the mold and 4 cm wide.

  6. Soak the strips in butter.

  7. Arrange the strips along the mold, overlapping.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill the mold with the cooked apples.

  2. Bake until set.

  3. Unmold the charlotte.

  4. Glaze it with apricot jam.

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. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + apricottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,458 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Form the bulk of the filling, which softens and turns tender when cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown and crisp when baked.
White bread
Forms the sturdy shell that holds the filling in its shape.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them caramelize lightly in the pan.
Apricot jam
Adds sweetness and a glossy finish to the unmolded charlotte.

The step that matters

Soak the bread in butter before arranging it. Bread that is evenly coated in butter browns and crisps as it bakes, and it holds its shape. Dry bread can stay pale, soft, or crumble when unmolded.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, butter, sugar, bread):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Pearfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, sugar, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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