Skip to main content
Dessert

Beown Charlotte Pudding

A baked apple and bread pudding with brown sugar and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Beown Charlotte Pudding

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 mold

  1. Grease a pudding mold with butter and sprinkle the bottom with brown sugar.

  2. Line the mold with thin slices of buttered bread, removing the crusts.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the mold with sliced baking apples, grated lemon peel, and chopped candied citron, mixing them well.

  2. Sweeten the apple mixture with brown sugar.

  3. Cover the top with thin slices of bread dipped in melted butter.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for three hours.

Serve

  1. Turn out the pudding; it should be brown and crisp on the outside.

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. Bread + appletop 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. Butter + appletop 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

Bread
Forms the outer shell and crisp, golden crust that holds the fruit filling together.
Baking apples
Provide moisture and tender body that softens into the filling as it bakes.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the exterior brown through caramelization.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the bread crisp and brown in the oven.
Candied citron
Adds concentrated sweetness and chewy texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Bake long enough for the crust to brown and crisp. Bread soaked in melted butter browns through Maillard reactions and caramelization only with sustained dry heat. Underbaking leaves the top soft and the apples watery, so the pudding will not hold its shape when turned out.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Apple Bread PuddingApple Bread Pudding21 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipes