Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Souffle

A light, baked dessert made with mashed bananas, egg whites, powdered sugar, and butter.

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

Why it works: Banana and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,536 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Banana Souffle

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Grease a pudding dish or individual molds with butter.

Make the souffle

  1. Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gently fold in the mashed bananas and powdered sugar.

  3. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish or molds.

Bake

  1. Place the dish in a pan of hot water and bake until firm.

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

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

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they trap air that lifts and gives the souffle its light structure.
Mashed bananas
Add moisture and natural sweetness, and their starch and sugars help the mixture set as it bakes.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps stabilise the whipped egg white foam.

The step that matters

Folding in the bananas and sugar. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whipped egg whites intact. Stirring or deflating the foam removes that air, so the souffle rises less and turns dense.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, butter. 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