Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Pudding

A layered dessert of sponge cake, bananas, custard, and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Banana and wine work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 244 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Layer

  1. Layer sliced sponge cake and sliced bananas in a glass dish alternately.

Make the custard and topping

  1. Make a soft custard by whisking the egg yolks with wine and pouring it over the layers.

  2. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and spread them over the top.

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 + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together244 recipes

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

  2. Banana + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

  3. Egg + winetop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cake
Forms the soft structure that holds the layers and soaks up the custard.
Bananas
Add sweetness, flavour and moisture between the cake layers.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and give it a rich, smooth texture.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they form a light, airy topping.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to stiff peaks. Whites beaten too little stay runny and will not hold their shape on top, while over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy and can separate. Stop when the peaks stand up firmly and the surface looks glossy.

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, wine):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Grapefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, wine. 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.

You might also like

Banana FillingBanana Filling16 recipesBanana SherbetBanana Sherbet10 recipesBanana FloatBanana Float9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes