Skip to main content
Dessert

Canned Fruit Charlotte

A chilled dessert of sponge cake soaked in canned fruit juice, topped with fruit and a stiffened egg white mixture.

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

Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Canned Fruit Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Line a glass dish with strips of stale sponge cake.

  2. Drain the juice from the canned fruit and pour it over the cake until it soaks up the juice.

  3. Evenly place the fruit over the soaked cake.

Make the topping and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff and dry, then gradually add the powdered sugar while continuing to beat.

  2. Add enough fruit juice to flavor and color the mixture.

  3. Heap the egg white mixture on top of the fruit and serve immediately.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Stale sponge cake
Soaks up the fruit juice and forms the soft base layer of the dish.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that forms the light topping.
Powdered sugar
Stabilizes the whipped egg whites and adds sweetness.
Canned fruit
Provides the fruit layer and flavor, with its juice coloring the topping.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff and dry. Egg whites must be whipped to stiff peaks without any trace of fat or yolk, because fat prevents the proteins from trapping air. Adding the sugar gradually helps the foam hold its shape.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes