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Dessert

Pineapple Charlotte

A chilled pineapple dessert with cream, jelly, biscuits, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and angelica share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 69 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pineapple Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Decorate the bottom of a plain round mold with the fruits and set them in jelly.

  2. Split the biscuits, trim the edges, and dip one edge of each into egg white to line the sides of the mold.

Make the filling

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in water or syrup.

  2. Add sugar and pineapple pulp to the dissolved gelatine.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool.

  4. Whisk the cream until stiff.

  5. Add the cooled gelatine mixture to the whipped cream.

  6. Stir until the mixture begins to set.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into the lined mold.

  2. Allow the mixture to set.

  3. Dip the mold in warm water.

  4. Turn the dessert out of the mold.

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. Biscuit + angelicatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together69 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + angelicatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Cream + biscuittop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Pineapple + biscuittop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Whipped to stiffness, it gives the charlotte its light, airy body.
Gelatine
Sets the dissolved liquid so the filling holds its shape when turned out.
Pineapple pulp
Supplies the fruit flavour and liquid that the gelatine sets.
Savoy biscuits
Form the lining around the sides, giving the dessert structure and a firm edge.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the pineapple.

The step that matters

Stir until the mixture begins to set. Gelatine starts to thicken as it cools. If the mixture is poured in fully liquid, or left to set too far, the whipped cream can deflate or the filling can separate, so the cook must stop at the point of thickening.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, biscuit, angelica. 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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