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Dessert

Banana Sundae

A dessert of ice cream topped with sliced bananas, vanilla syrup, and optional fruit or nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,430 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Banana Sundae

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scoop a dish of ice cream into a bowl.

  2. Top with sliced bananas.

  3. Drizzle a little vanilla syrup over the bananas.

  4. Garnish with a cherry, slice of orange, pineapple, walnut, or pecan as desired.

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. Banana + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Vanilla + cherrytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together890 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Vanilla + pineappletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together911 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Cherry + pineappletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together537 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ice cream
Provides the cold, creamy base that the other toppings sit on.
Sliced bananas
Adds soft texture and natural sweetness to the sundae.
Vanilla syrup
Adds sweetness and vanilla aroma that flavours the bananas and ice cream.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, banana, vanilla, syrup, cherry, orange, pineapple):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, banana, vanilla, syrup, cherry, orange, pineapple. 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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