Skip to main content
Dessert

Iced Charlotte À LA

A chilled dessert made by layering cake slices with a white egg white and sugar mixture, then decorating with pistachios.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Iced Charlotte À LA

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake case

  1. Cut cake slices to fit the depth of the mould and a circular piece for the bottom.

  2. Mix egg whites with sugar to create a cement.

  3. Arrange cake slices around the mould, overlapping slightly, and cement them together.

  4. Fix the circular piece at the bottom with cement.

  5. Let the cement dry until firm.

Finish and decorate

  1. Choose a slightly smaller mould for the ice.

  2. Turn the cake case onto a dish and brush with thin cement.

  3. Sprinkle with chopped pistachio nuts.

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. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + pistachiotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. 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

Egg whites
Form the cement that binds the cake slices together and sets firm as it dries.
Sponge cake slices
Form the outer shell that holds the charlotte's shape and gives a tender, soft structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the cement and helps the egg white mixture hold together.

The step that matters

Let the cement dry until firm. Egg white and sugar cement sets as it dries. If the case is moved or filled before it is firm, the slices can slide apart and the shape can collapse.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, cream, pistachio):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, cream, pistachio. 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

Pistachio Ice CreamPistachio Ice Cream36 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes