Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Parfait

A chilled dessert of mashed bananas, sugar, lemon, fruit, rum, and whipped cream, set in a mold with salt and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Banana and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124 recipes. Both carry 3-methyl-1-butanol acetate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Banana Parfait

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the banana base

  1. Peel the bananas, remove coarse threads, and press the pulp through a sieve to yield 1¼ cups.

  2. Add sugar and lemon juice to the pulp, then cook over hot water until scalded. Set aside to cool.

Prepare the fruit and cream

  1. Beat the heavy cream until firm.

  2. Chop the citron, candied apricots or pineapple, and Maraschino cherries. Pour rum over the fruit and let it stand for 1 hour or overnight.

  3. Line a quart mold with paper and chill it thoroughly.

Assemble and freeze

  1. Stir the fruit into the banana mixture, then fold in the cream.

  2. Pour the mixture into the mold, filling it to overflow. Cover with paper and press down.

  3. Pack the mold in equal measures of coarse sea salt and crushed ice. Let it stand for 3 hours.

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. Banana + apricottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methyl-1-butanol acetate (fruity).

  2. Banana + rumtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together183 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Apricot + rumtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Lemon + apricottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the main flavor and a smooth, sweet body for the parfait.
Heavy cream
Whipped to firmness, it adds richness and a light, airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the banana pulp and softens the texture of the frozen dessert.
Candied apricots or pineapple
Adds chewy, concentrated fruit sweetness and texture.
Jamaica rum
Flavors the fruit and adds aroma; alcohol also keeps the frozen dessert softer.

The step that matters

Pack the mold in salt and ice. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice, making it colder than ice alone so the parfait freezes. Packing evenly and leaving it undisturbed for the full time keeps the mixture uniformly frozen.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, sugar, cream, apricot, rum):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar, cream, apricot, rum. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes