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Dessert

Bananas and Rice

A sweet rice pudding cooked with milk, butter, and bananas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Bananas and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, butter, and sugar; bring to a boil.

  2. Mix rice with a little salt and enough water to cover.

  3. Peel and slice the bananas, placing them in a pie dish.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the rice mixture into the boiling milk, stirring constantly until cooked.

  2. Pour the rice mixture over the bananas and let it cool before serving.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Rice + bananatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + bananatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,536 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ground rice
Its starch thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding its body.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the rice cooks and thickens in.
Bananas
Add natural sweetness, fruity flavour and soft texture to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the milk and bananas.

The step that matters

Pour the rice mixture into the boiling milk while stirring constantly. Constant stirring keeps the rice grains dispersed so they cook evenly instead of clumping or scorching on the base of the pan, while the starch gelatinises and thickens the milk.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, butter, 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.

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