Name: Bananas and Sugar
Ingredients: 4 ripe bananas; ½ cup sugar

Why it works: Banana and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,102 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Bananas and Sugar

Ingredients

4 ripe bananas
½ cup sugar

Directions

Prepare

Peel the bananas and slice them, then put them into a bowl.
Sprinkle the sugar evenly over the banana slices.
Gently toss the bananas with the sugar until well coated.

Rest and serve

Let sit for a few minutes to allow the sugar to dissolve slightly.
Serve as a sweet treat or dessert.

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 + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas: Provide the main body and natural sweetness of the dish.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and dissolves into the banana juices to form a light syrup.

“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.