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Dessert

Pear Charlotte

A baked dessert of pears in a buttered bread mold, topped with apricot jam or powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 218 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Pear Charlotte

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a brisk oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel and core the pears, then cut them into quarters.

  2. Dip the pear quarters in powdered sugar and sauté in clarified butter until tender; drain well.

Line the mold

  1. Cut the bread into a small round for the bottom and fingers for the sides of a round mold.

  2. Dip the bread pieces in clarified butter before placing them in the mold, overlapping them.

  3. Fill the mold with the cooked pears and cover with buttered bread slices.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a brisk oven at 400°F (200°C) until the bread is lightly browned.

  2. Turn the charlotte out of the mold and brush with apricot jam or dust with powdered sugar.

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. Pear + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  4. Bread + apricottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

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

  5. Pear + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the soft fruit filling that becomes tender and sweet when sautéed.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown evenly in the oven.
Bread
Forms the structural shell that holds the pear filling in shape.
Powdered sugar
Lightly sweetens the pears and helps them caramelize slightly while sautéing.

The step that matters

Drain the sautéed pears well. Excess liquid from the pears would soak the bread lining and make the charlotte soggy and unable to hold its shape when turned out of the mold.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, bread, apricot. 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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