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
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the apples
Peel the apples thinly with a sharp knife.
Slice the apples and remove the core.
Place the sliced apples in a saucepan with sugar to taste and ⅓ cup of water.
Wash the lemon, peel it thinly, and tie the rind with a piece of cotton.
Add the lemon rind to the saucepan with the apples.
Cook on the stove, stirring until it boils and the apples reduce by half, about 1 to 1.5 hours.
Remove from heat and take out the lemon peel.
Prepare the bread and mold
Prepare a round tin mold (about 1 pint).
Melt and clarify ¼ lb of butter in a saucepan.
Cut a slice of bread about ⅛ inch thick, round to fit the mold.
Cut the round bread into quarters, dip in clarified butter, and place at the bottom of the mold.
Cut additional slices of bread ⅛ inch thick and the depth of the mold.
Cut these slices into 1-inch wide strips.
Dip the strips into the clarified butter.
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.
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Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together27,232 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,790 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
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Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together7,551 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together8,706 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Cooking apples
- Provide the bulk of the filling, which softens and thickens as it cooks down.
- Loaf sugar
- Sweetens the apples and helps them cook down into a thick, glossy compote.
- Bread
- Forms the golden, structural shell that holds the apple filling in shape.
- Clarified butter
- Coats the bread so it crisps and browns in the mold instead of soaking up moisture.
The step that matters
Reducing the apples. Cooking the apples slowly until they reduce by half concentrates their flavor and removes excess water. If they stay too wet, the filling will be runny and can make the bread shell soggy.
Swap the lemon
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, bread, butter):
- Figfits better
- Pearfits better
- Vanillafits better
- Lemonthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, bread, butter. 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.
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