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Dessert

Banana Betty

A layered banana bread cake made with stale bread, butter, sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Banana Betty

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the stale bread as thin as possible.

  2. Brown the slices delicately in a pan and spread with butter.

  3. Butter a baking dish and sprinkle with crumbs.

Layer and bake

  1. Add a layer of toasted bread, followed by a layer of peeled and quartered bananas.

  2. Sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice.

  3. Repeat the layers.

  4. Pour 1 cup of boiling water over the top and cover with crumbs.

  5. Bake covered until heated through.

Serve

  1. Serve with additional lemon juice.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Sugar and cinnamon 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

Stale bread
Soaks up liquid and gives the dessert its soft, layered structure.
Bananas (in the method)
Add moisture and natural sweetness as they soften during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly in the pan.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet bananas and sugar.

The step that matters

Bake covered until heated through. Covering the dish traps steam, which keeps the bread and bananas moist while the layers heat through evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar, cinnamon. 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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