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Dessert

Apple Charlotte

A baked apple dessert with butter, sugar, lemon rind, and bread crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Apple Charlotte

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel, core, and slice the apples.

  2. Combine the apples, sugar, and 2 tablespoons of water in a saucepan.

  3. Cook until tender.

  4. Stir in the butter and lemon rind.

  5. Sweeten to taste.

Line the mold

  1. Grease a plain soufflé mold with melted butter.

  2. Line the bottom with quarters of bread dipped in melted butter.

  3. Line the sides with overlapping rounds of bread or strips.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the mold with the apple pulp and cover with a round of bread.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.

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

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

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooking apples
Cook down into a soft pulp that forms the filling.
Bread
Forms the golden, structural shell that holds the apple pulp in shape.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the apples and adds caramel notes as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown and crisp in the oven.

The step that matters

Line the mold tightly with bread. Gaps or thin spots in the bread lining let the soft apple pulp leak out and weaken the shell, so the bread should overlap and be buttered to seal and brown evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, 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.

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