Name: Baked Bananas
Ingredients: 3 bananas; 3 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces; 3 teaspoons water

Why it works: Banana and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,536 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Baked Bananas

Ingredients

3 bananas
3 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
3 teaspoons water

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Strip off one-third of the skin from each banana and loosen the remaining skin with a spoon.
Arrange the bananas in a baking pan with the stripped side facing up.

Bake

Place a piece of butter on each banana and sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of water.
Bake for about 20 minutes.

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.

Banana + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,536 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas: Provide the main body and sweetness, softening as they bake in their skins.
Butter: Adds fat that enriches flavour and helps the bananas brown as they bake.

“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.