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Dessert

Banana Fie

A pie filled with sliced bananas, powdered sugar, lemon juice, and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Banana Fie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the shell

  1. Invert a deep pie tin, cover it with pastry, and bake until golden.

  2. Carefully remove the crust from the tin and place it on a plate to cool.

Assemble and finish

  1. Fill the shell with sliced bananas, sprinkle with powdered sugar, and drizzle lemon juice over them; use about three layers of bananas.

  2. Whip the heavy cream until soft peaks form, sweeten and add flavoring if desired, then spread it over the bananas.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Banana + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Banana + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Pastry
Forms a crisp, golden shell that holds the filling.
Bananas
Provide the soft, sweet fruit layer that fills the shell.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and slows browning of the banana slices.
Heavy cream
Whipped to soft peaks, it forms a light, rich topping over the fruit.

The step that matters

Removing the crust from the tin. A baked pastry shell is fragile while hot. Letting it cool before handling helps it keep its shape and avoids cracks or breakage when it is moved to a plate.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar, cream. 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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