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Dessert

Banana Pie

A baked pie with sliced bananas, a sugar‑egg‑flour filling, and whipped egg whites topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,470 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Bake the pie crust first.

  2. Slice the bananas and place them in the crust.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix sugar, egg yolks, and flour to form a paste.

  2. Pour the paste into the boiling milk and cook until thickened.

  3. Pour the filling over the bananas.

Top and finish

  1. Whip the egg whites and spread them on top.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Banana + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,725 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard filling as they set when heated.
Flour
Stabilises the paste and helps the filling thicken when cooked in milk.
Egg whites
Whipped into a light topping that adds volume and a soft texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the egg yolk mixture.
Bananas
Provide the fruit layer and their flavour and softness to the pie.

The step that matters

Pour the paste into the boiling milk and cook until thickened. Adding the egg and flour paste gradually to hot liquid, while stirring, prevents lumps and curdling. The filling must be cooked long enough for the starch to thicken fully, but not so long that the egg yolks scramble.

Swap the banana

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

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

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