Name: Candied Bananas
Ingredients: bananas; 1 ounce alum; ¼ ounce sulphite of soda; lukewarm syrup at 25° Beaume; gold yellow aniline color (optional)

Why it works: Banana and syrup work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Candied Bananas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bananas

Peel the bananas by hand, avoiding knives or metal.
Dip the bananas in cold water mixed with alum and sulphite of soda for one hour.
Lay the bananas on white willow trays and sulfur them for three hours.

Candy in syrup

Place the bananas in stone jars and pour lukewarm syrup over them.
Drain the syrup and reboil it at 26° Beaume.
Pour the reboiled syrup over the bananas.
Increase the syrup temperature by one degree every three days until it reaches 36° Beaume.
Heat the syrup from lukewarm to hot.
If the bananas lack color, add gold yellow aniline color to the syrup.
Boil the syrup.
Pour the colored syrup over the fruits.

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.

Banana + syruptop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together200 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas: The fruit being candied; its flesh firms and turns translucent as sugar replaces its water.
Syrup: Sugar concentration draws water out of the fruit and preserves it, so the bananas hold their shape and sweetness.
Alum: Firms the fruit's tissue so it holds its shape through long soaking and syruping.

The step that matters

Increase the syrup temperature by one degree every three days until it reaches 36° Beaume.. Raising sugar concentration gradually lets water leave the fruit slowly. Too strong a syrup too soon can toughen or shrink the bananas, while too weak a syrup leaves them watery and prone to spoiling.

“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.