Name: Apple Charlotte
Ingredients: Bread, sliced into ¼ inch thick slices; Melted butter; Apple sauce (cooked with apples cut into quarters, sweetened, and flavored with lemon juice); Cream or sauce for serving

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 ↓

Apple Charlotte

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Bread, sliced into ¼ inch thick slices
Melted butter
Apple sauce (cooked with apples cut into quarters, sweetened, and flavored with lemon juice)
Cream or sauce for serving

Directions

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

Cut bread into slices ¼ inch thick, then into 1 inch wide strips.
Dip each piece in melted butter and line a baking dish with them, ensuring the pieces meet closely.
Fill the center of the dish with apple sauce.
Cover the top with more strips of bread dipped in melted butter.
Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 40 minutes.
Carefully turn out onto a flat dish and serve with cream or sauce.

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,790 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

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

Swap the lemon

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

Strawberryfits better
Pearfits better
Figfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, apple, sauce, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.