Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Filling

A banana filling made with egg white icing and sliced or chopped bananas, optionally flavored with vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Banana Filling

Why it works: Sugar and banana are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,102 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Banana Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add powdered sugar until smooth to make icing.

Assemble

  1. Spread the icing on the layers of the cake.

  2. Cover the icing thickly and entirely with sliced or chopped bananas.

  3. Optionally flavor the icing with vanilla.

  4. Frost the top simply.

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

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

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + bananatop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the whipped whites to sweeten them and make the icing smooth.
Bananas
Cover the icing as a fruity topping that adds moisture and banana flavor.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be whipped to stiff peaks before the sugar is added. Under-whipped whites stay runny and the icing will not hold its shape or spread well. Adding sugar gradually helps the foam stay stable and smooth.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, 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.

You might also like

Banana SherbetBanana Sherbet10 recipesBanana FloatBanana Float9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes