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Banana Fritters

Banana fritters are fried bananas coated in breadcrumbs, served with lemon juice and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Banana Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the bananas and dip them in the beaten egg whites.

  2. Roll the bananas in bread crumbs until coated.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the butter in a pan and fry the bananas until golden brown.

  2. Place the fried bananas on a dish.

  3. Squeeze lemon juice over the bananas and sprinkle with sifted 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  4. Banana + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the soft, sweet filling that cooks through inside the coating.
Egg whites
Bind the bread crumbs to the bananas so the coating stays in place.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp outer coating that browns when fried.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the coating.

The step that matters

Frying the coated bananas until golden brown. Frying over moderate heat browns the crumb coating through the Maillard reaction while the banana warms inside. Too high a heat burns the crumbs before the banana softens, and too low a heat leaves the coating greasy and pale.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, butter, lemon, 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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