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Dessert

Banana Snow

A gelatin dessert made with bananas, lemon juice, sugar, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Pour boiling water over the soaked gelatine.

  3. Add sugar and lemon juice, then stir well.

Make the snow

  1. When the mixture is cold and beginning to thicken, add the beaten egg whites.

  2. Beat the mixture until stiff and white, about 1 hour.

  3. Peel and slice the bananas thinly, then stir them into the mixture.

Set and serve

  1. Dip molds in cold water, fill with the mixture, and set on ice to harden.

  2. Serve with whipped cream or custard made from egg yolks, milk, and sugar.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + bananatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + bananatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture into a light, firm structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they give the dessert its airy, snowy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the dessert and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Bananas
Add body, flavour and soft fruit pieces throughout the set dessert.

The step that matters

Beating the mixture until stiff. The mixture must be cold and just beginning to thicken before the egg whites go in. If it is still warm or too liquid, the foam collapses and the snowy texture is lost, while the long beating builds the stable foam that holds the dessert light.

Swap the banana

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

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

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