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Dessert

Banana Fritters

A fried batter of flour, eggs, milk, and mashed bananas, served hot with lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Banana Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix and sift the dry ingredients.

  2. Beat the egg well, add the milk, and combine with the dry ingredients; beat until smooth.

  3. Add the bananas, pressed through a sieve, and the lemon juice.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls into deep hot fat.

  2. Drain and serve hot with Lemon Sauce.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk 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

Bread flour
Forms the batter's structure so the fritters hold their shape when fried.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds richness and structure as it sets in the hot fat.
Baking powder
Releases gas during frying, helping the fritters puff and turn light.
Bananas
Add moisture, sweetness and flavour to the batter.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a smooth batter that fries to a tender interior.

The step that matters

Drop spoonfuls into deep hot fat. If the fat is not hot enough, the batter absorbs oil and becomes greasy instead of crisping quickly. Deep, hot fat seals the outside fast so the fritters stay light inside.

Swap the banana

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

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

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