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Dessert

Apple Charlotte

A baked dessert of apples simmered with sugar, butter, lemon peel, cinnamon, and water, set in buttered bread and glazed with sugar and apricot jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apple Charlotte

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a rather brisk oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the apple marmalade

  1. Peel, core, and slice the apples.

  2. Combine apples, sugar, butter, lemon peel, cinnamon, and water in a saucepan.

  3. Cover and boil on high heat until apples are melted.

  4. Remove the lid.

  5. Stir over medium heat until thickened.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a charlotte mold with buttered bread pieces, overlapping them.

  2. Fill the mold with the apple marmalade.

  3. Cover with a buttered bread piece.

  4. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until lightly colored.

Serve

  1. Turn out onto a dish.

  2. Glaze with sifted sugar.

  3. Pour diluted apricot jam around the base.

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. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Cinnamon + apricottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Break down into a soft marmalade that forms the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it thicken as the apples cook down.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the filling and browns the bread.
Thin bread
Forms the golden crust that encloses the apple filling.

The step that matters

Stir over medium heat until thickened. Cooking the apple mixture long enough drives off excess water so the marmalade is thick enough to hold its shape in the mold. Too much liquid left in the filling can make the charlotte soggy and cause it to collapse when turned out.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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