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Dessert

Charlotte of Apples

A baked apple dessert with butter, lemon peel, cinnamon, sugar, apricot marmalade, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 of Apples

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the apples

  1. Quarter and peel the apples.

  2. In a saucepan, combine apples, butter, lemon peel, cinnamon, and sugar.

  3. Stew over low heat, stirring with a wooden spoon until thickened.

  4. Add apricot marmalade and mix well.

Line the mold

  1. Prepare a mold by dipping bread in clarified butter and lining the bottom with round pieces.

  2. Line the sides of the mold with thin slices of buttered bread.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the apple mixture into the mold and bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

  2. Turn out onto a dish and serve hot and crisp.

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. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

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

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Cinnamon + apricottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Cook down into a soft, thickened filling that forms the body of the dessert.
Bread
Forms a sturdy shell that holds the filling and crisps and browns in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown and crisp during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it thicken and turn golden as it cooks.
Apricot marmalade
Adds fruity sweetness and body to the apple filling.

The step that matters

Stewing the apple mixture until thickened. Apples release water as they cook, so they must be stirred over low heat until thick; a loose filling would make the bread shell soggy and the charlotte collapse when turned out.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, cinnamon, sugar, apricot, 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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