Skip to main content
Dessert

Pie-plant Charlotte

A baked dessert of pie-plant, sugar, bread crumbs, and butter, served lukewarm with boiled custard.

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

Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Pie-plant Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Butter a baking dish.

Layer and bake

  1. Layer bread crumbs, then pie-plant covered with sugar, repeating until the dish is filled.

  2. Top with a final layer of bread crumbs dotted with small bits of butter.

  3. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve lukewarm with boiled custard poured around it.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pie-plant
Provides the tart fruit that forms the main body of the dessert.
Sugar
Sweetens the pie-plant and helps draw out its juices as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the fruit juices and give the dish a soft, set structure.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top layer of crumbs brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Layer and bake. Sugar draws water out of the pie-plant, so the layers can turn soupy if the dish is not filled evenly and baked long enough. Thorough baking lets the crumbs absorb the juices and set.

“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

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesBrown Bread PuddingBrown Bread Pudding47 recipes