Name: Apple Charlotte
Ingredients: apples; lemon or cinnamon; bread; butter; cold custard; cream; sugar

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 ↓

Apple Charlotte

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Stew apples until soft and flavor with lemon or cinnamon.
Prepare nice bread and butter.
Line the bottom of a pudding dish with the bread and butter.
Add a layer of the stewed apples, then continue layering until filled.
Pour cold custard over the top.
Bake until set, then let cool.
Turn out and serve with a sauce made of cream and 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.

Bread + buttertop 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).
Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,790 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

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

Swap the lemon

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

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Pearfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, bread, butter, cream, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.