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Dessert

A Charlotte

A baked apple and bread dessert with butter, sugar, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

A Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dish

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Grease a baking dish with butter.

  3. Line the bottom and sides of the dish with thin slices of white bread.

Layer and bake

  1. Layer thin slices of apples in the dish, sprinkling sugar and bits of butter between layers.

  2. Soak additional thin slices of bread in warm milk, then place a plate and a weight on top to press it down on the apples.

  3. Bake slowly for three hours.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

White bread
Forms the structure of the charlotte, lining the dish and holding the layers together as it bakes.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling, softening as they bake to become tender and moist.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apples caramelize slightly during the long bake.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and helping the bread brown and crisp at the edges.
Milk
Soaks the bread so it softens and binds into a tender, custard-like layer.

The step that matters

Bake slowly for three hours. A low, long bake lets the apples soften fully and the bread dry and set without scorching. Too high a heat would brown the outside before the filling cooks through.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

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