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Dessert

Apple Charlotte

A baked dessert of buttered bread triangles and apple sauce, flavored with cinnamon and lemon, topped with a butter-sugar glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Apple Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pan and bread

  1. Butter the bottom of a tin pan.

  2. Cover the bottom with a layer of buttered bread triangles.

  3. Line the sides of the pan with buttered bread slices, crusts removed, buttered side facing the pan.

Fill and cook

  1. Fill the pan with apple sauce, adding cinnamon, lemon, and sugar to taste.

  2. Cover the pan and place it on live coals, piling coals around the sides.

  3. Before the bread burns, replace the cover with a plate and invert the pan.

Serve

  1. Serve with a cold sauce made by mixing ½ cup of butter and 1 cup of sugar.

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 + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

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

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 apple filling in shape.
Apple sauce
Makes up the soft filling, providing moisture and most of the flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown while keeping it from sticking.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple filling and the cold sauce.

The step that matters

Inverting before the bread burns. Bread, butter and sugar brown quickly over live coals. Removing the cover and turning the pan out at the right moment keeps the crust golden rather than scorched while the filling heats through.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, apple, sauce, cinnamon, 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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