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Dessert

Apple Charlotte, a Very Simple

A layered dessert of buttered bread and sliced apples baked with lemon and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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, a Very Simple

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Butter a pie dish.

Assemble

  1. Place a layer of bread and butter, without the crust, at the bottom.

  2. Add a layer of pared, cored, and thinly sliced apples.

  3. Sprinkle with lemon peel and juice, and sweeten with moist sugar.

  4. Repeat layers until the dish is full, finishing with a layer of bread and butter.

  5. Cover with apple peel to prevent browning.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) for about 1 hour.

  2. Turn the charlotte onto a dish, sprinkle with sugar, and serve.

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. Bread + buttertop 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 and butter
Forms the layered structure and soaks up juices while baking, giving the charlotte its body.
Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling, becoming soft and sweet as they bake.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps keep the apples from browning.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic oils that give a fresh, fragrant lemon flavour to the apples.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the apple layers and helps them caramelise slightly during baking.

The step that matters

Cover with apple peel to prevent browning. Exposed apple flesh oxidises quickly in the oven's heat, turning dark and bitter-tasting. A covering of peel shields the top layer, and the lemon juice slows browning further.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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