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Banana Soup

A creamy soup made with milk, bananas, butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Banana Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a pot over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and mix thoroughly.

  3. Slowly add the milk while stirring constantly.

  4. Bring to a boil, then add the bananas.

  5. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with crackers.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Banana + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying the banana flavor.
Banana
Provides sweetness, body and banana flavor to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter and milk.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the flour blend smoothly.

The step that matters

Add the milk slowly while stirring. Flour mixed into hot butter forms lumps if liquid is added too fast. Slow addition with constant stirring lets the starch disperse evenly before it thickens.

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, pepper. 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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