Name: Charlotte
Ingredients: thin slices of fine French or English bread; warm clarified butter; 1 egg; apples; cinnamon; cloves; lemon peel; powdered sugar

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Line a well-buttered mold with thin slices of bread, about 5 inches wide.
Dip the bread slices in warm clarified butter and place them in the mold, overlapping slightly.
Cut a piece of bread to fit the bottom of the mold and dip it in butter.
Brush all the bread with beaten egg to help it adhere.
Prepare the apple marmalade by boiling apples with a little water, cinnamon, cloves, and lemon peel.
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and return the pulp to a small pan.
Sweeten the pulp with powdered sugar and boil for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

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.

Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,598 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,774 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

Swap the lemon

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

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Pearfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, egg, apple, cinnamon, clove, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.