Name: Banana PupDDING
Ingredients: 1 pint thin boiled custard; thin slices of sponge cake; 8-10 bananas, thinly sliced; ½ cup whipped cream

Why it works: Banana and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,180 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana PupDDING

Ingredients

1 pint thin boiled custard
thin slices of sponge cake
8-10 bananas, thinly sliced
½ cup whipped cream

Directions

Prepare

Make a pint of thin boiled custard and chill it.

Assemble and serve

Line a dish with thin slices of sponge cake.
Layer the cake with thinly sliced bananas.
Pour the chilled custard over the layers.
Whip ½ cup of cream and heap it over the pudding.
Chill for a few minutes before serving.

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 + creamtop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,180 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled custard: Forms the creamy, sweet base that soaks into the cake layers.
Sponge cake: Provides a soft, absorbent structure that holds the custard and bananas.
Bananas: Add sweetness, fruity aroma and a soft texture between the layers.
Whipped cream: Adds a light, fatty topping that contrasts with the dense custard.

“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.