Name: Pie-plant Charlotte
Ingredients: 1 pound pie-plant, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces; 1 pound soft sugar; Bread crumbs or slices of bread; Butter

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

1 pound pie-plant, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 pound soft sugar
Bread crumbs or slices of bread
Butter

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

Butter a pudding dish.
Cover the bottom with a layer of bread crumbs.

Layer

Add a layer of pie-plant and sprinkle thickly with sugar.
Repeat layers of crumbs, pie-plant, and sugar until the dish is filled.
Dot the last layer of crumbs with bits of butter.

Bake and serve

Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Serve cold with cream.

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).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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 filling that gives the charlotte its main flavour and moisture.
Soft sugar: Sweetens the pie-plant and draws out its juices as it cooks.
Bread crumbs: Form the soft layers that hold the fruit and absorb its juices.
Butter: Adds richness and helps the top crumbs brown in the oven.

“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.