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Dessert

Tropical Snow

A layered dessert of sliced bananas, oranges, grated coconut, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 549 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Tropical Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the bananas thinly.

  2. Cut the oranges into small pieces.

  3. Grate the coconut.

Assemble

  1. Arrange the orange, banana, and coconut in layers, sprinkling sugar between each layer.

  2. Top with a layer of coconut and a few banana slices for decoration.

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 + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together549 recipes

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

  2. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  3. Orange + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Oranges
Provide juice and bright citrus acidity that moistens and flavors the layers.
Bananas
Add soft texture and natural sweetness to the layered fruit.
Coconut
Adds fat, aroma, and a light, fluffy texture to the layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out juices as it sits between the layers.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, coconut, 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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