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Dessert

Baked Bananas

A simple oven-baked banana dessert with butter, lemon, cinnamon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Baked Bananas

Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked Bananas

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Peel the bananas and place them in a tin pan.

  3. Add cold water and butter to the pan.

  4. Drizzle lemon juice over each banana.

  5. Dredge the bananas with cinnamon and sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 15 minutes or until easily pierced with a fork.

  2. Serve immediately.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Banana + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

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

  5. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Bananas
Provide the main body and soft, sweet flesh that becomes tender when baked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the bananas brown lightly and taste rounder.
Sugar
Sweetens the bananas and promotes light browning on the surface in the oven.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and slows browning of the cut fruit.

The step that matters

Bake until easily pierced. Bananas soften quickly in the oven, and the fork test shows when the starches and pectin have softened enough. Overbaking leaves them mushy and collapsed, so check at the stated time.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, cinnamon, 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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