Skip to main content
Dessert

Charlotte

A baked dessert made with fried bread crusts, apple marmalade, and bread crumbs.

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

Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Grease the bottom and sides of a mold with butter.

  2. Line the mold with fried bread crusts to form a second mold.

Fill and cook

  1. Fill the mold with apple marmalade and cover it completely with bread crumbs.

  2. Place the mold over low heat, covering it with a lid and some heat on top.

  3. Cook for 30 minutes, then invert onto a plate to serve.

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

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

  2. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

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

  3. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apple marmalade
Provides the sweet, moist fruit filling that gives the charlotte its body.
Fried bread crusts
Form a crisp, sturdy shell that holds the shape when the mold is inverted.
Bread crumbs
Form a golden, crisp topping that browns over the filling.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat under a lid. Gentle, even heat from below and above warms the filling through without scorching the bread. Too much heat can burn the crumbs before the filling is hot, while too little leaves the center cold and the shell soggy.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Applethe original
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Peachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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.

You might also like

Apple Bread PuddingApple Bread Pudding21 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes