Name: Cherry Charlotte
Ingredients: 1 pound morella cherries; ¾ pound sugar; 1 teaspoon flour; butter (for spreading); baker's bread; cream (for serving)

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 ↓

Cherry Charlotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Stew the morella cherries.
Add ¾ pound of sugar and 1 teaspoon of flour mixed with a little water to the cherries.

Assemble and serve

Butter some slices of baker's bread and lay them on a dish.
Spread some of the stewed fruit over the bread, then add another layer of bread and fruit.
Cover the top with the remaining fruit.
Serve with cream.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Morella cherries: Provide the main fruit, which softens and releases juice when stewed to form the filling.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and helps draw out juice from the cherries as they stew.
Flour: Thickens the cherry juices so the filling holds its shape between the bread layers.
Baker's bread: Forms the structure of the charlotte, soaking up fruit juice as the layers sit.

“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.