Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from eggs, cream, milk, bananas, and sugar.

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

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Banana Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the bananas and mash them until they become a paste.

  2. Bring the milk to a boil.

  3. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sugar.

Make the base

  1. Add the beaten egg mixture to the boiling milk, then stir in the cream.

  2. Allow the mixture to cool, then freeze it.

Freeze and finish

  1. When the cream is partially frozen, add the mashed bananas.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Eggs
Egg proteins set with heat, thickening the milk into a custard and adding richness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs thicken and the cream enriches.
Cream
Adds fat, which keeps the frozen texture smooth and creamy.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and keeps the frozen mixture softer by lowering its freezing point.
Bananas
Add banana flavor, natural sweetness and a soft, thick body to the ice cream.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten eggs to the boiling milk. Egg proteins set when heated, so pouring them into very hot milk can scramble them into curds instead of a smooth custard base.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

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

More banana ice cream recipes

Frozen 6 See all 61 →

You might also like

Banana FillingBanana Filling16 recipesBanana SherbetBanana Sherbet10 recipesBanana FloatBanana Float9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes