This has nothing to do with the typical Viennese strudel made from dough that’s stretched paper-thin, though in Vienna strudels are made from many kinds of dough, including Danish pastry dough.

This has nothing to do with the typical Viennese strudel made from dough that’s stretched paper-thin, though in Vienna strudels are made from many kinds of dough, including Danish pastry dough.

A classic apple charlotte is made in a bucket-shaped metal mold lined with buttered white bread and filled with cooked sweetened apples. Served unmolded and still warm, it’s a perfect old-fashioned fall or winter dessert.

This is so much more practical to prepare and serve than a standard apple pie baked in a sloping sided pie pan. It’s free-standing on a platter for serving and only needs to be cut into wedges, with none of the sometimes destructive digging underneath the bottom crust to extract wedges from the other type of pan. It’s also much more elegant looking than a plain apple pie.

I first encountered Tarte Tatin in early 1974, when I lived briefly with the Pinelli family at their small hotel in Monte Carlo. Raymonde Pinelli loved apples in all forms and had beautiful 19th-century earthenware Calvados jugs in the shape of apples, which I have to confess I coveted.