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Banana Custard Pie

A pie filled with a banana custard made from mashed bananas, eggs, sugar, milk, salt, and cinnamon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,655 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Banana Custard Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mash and strain the bananas.

  2. Add the well-beaten eggs and whip together until light and frothy.

  3. Stir in the sugar, hot milk, salt, and cinnamon or vanilla.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the pie crust and bake.

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 + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Banana + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Banana + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Bananas
Mashed bananas add flavor, sweetness, and a soft, smooth body to the filling.
Eggs
Eggs set as the custard heats, giving the filling its structure.
Milk
Hot milk supplies the liquid and helps the custard set evenly.
Sugar
Sugar adds sweetness and softens the texture of the set custard.

The step that matters

Stir in the hot milk. Hot milk poured into beaten eggs too quickly can cook the eggs in streaks, leaving a grainy custard. Adding it gradually while stirring keeps the eggs evenly blended so the filling sets smooth.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, cinnamon. 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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