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Dessert

Apple Charlotte

A baked apple dessert with bread, butter, and apricot jam, served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Butter a small, deep pie dish or plain mold.

  2. Cut a thin piece of bread to fit the top of the mold and butter both sides.

  3. Place the bread in the mold and line the sides with buttered strips of bread.

Fill and bake

  1. Layer the small apple pieces (or sliced ripe plantains) with apricot jam between each layer.

  2. Sprinkle lime juice and add a good amount of white sugar over the layers.

  3. Cover the bottom of the mold with slices of buttered bread.

  4. Bake until the bread is nicely browned.

Serve

  1. Turn out carefully and serve with cold custards.

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

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

  3. Apricot + limetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the buttered shell that holds the fruit and crisps to a golden browned exterior.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the bread brown evenly and gives the shell a rich flavor.
Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling, softening as they bake and adding fruity flavor.
Apricot jam
Adds sweetness and fruit flavor between the layers and helps bind them together.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fruit caramelize slightly as it bakes.

The step that matters

Bake until the bread is nicely browned. The bread shell must bake long enough to brown and dry out so it holds its shape when turned out. Underbaked bread stays soft and may collapse or stick to the mold.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Limethe original

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