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Dessert

Charlotte Pudding

A baked dessert made with layers of buttered bread, marmalade, and sliced apples, sweetened with moist sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Charlotte Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the basin

  1. Butter a quart basin and cover it thickly with moist sugar.

  2. Cut thin slices of bread-and-butter without crusts and fix them around the basin, butter side next to the sugar.

Layer and press

  1. Layer bread and butter at the bottom, followed by a layer of marmalade, then thin slices of apples, repeating until the basin is full.

  2. Press down with a saucer and a weight.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for one hour, then turn out carefully and serve hot.

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

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

  2. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

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

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide bulk and tart fruit flavour that softens as the pudding bakes.
Bread
Forms the structure of the pudding, soaking up butter and juices as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown and crisp at the edges.
Moist sugar
Caramelises against the basin to sweeten and flavour the outside of the pudding.
Orange marmalade
Adds sweetness, bitter citrus aroma and moisture between the layers.

The step that matters

Press down with a saucer and a weight. Pressing compacts the layers so the bread and apple stay in firm contact. Without it, air gaps can form, the pudding may collapse when turned out, and the layers may bake unevenly.

Swap the orange

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

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

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