Name: Banana Icing or Filling
Ingredients: ½ cup bananas, cut into fine pieces; 1 cup boiled icing; 1 teaspoon lemon juice

Why it works: Banana and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,134 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Banana Icing or Filling

Ingredients

½ cup bananas, cut into fine pieces
1 cup boiled icing
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Directions

Add the bananas to the boiled icing.
Flavor the mixture with lemon juice.

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 + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas: Provide fruity flavor and soft texture to the icing.
Boiled icing: Forms the sweet, creamy base that the bananas are folded into.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the banana flavor.

“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.