Skip to main content
Drink

Banana Frappe

A chilled banana beverage made with bananas, sugar, water, pineapple, orange, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Banana Frappe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Cook the bananas in 1 pound of sugar and 1 quart of water until soft.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

Finish and freeze

  1. Add the juice of the pineapple, oranges, and lemon.

  2. Freeze the mixture until solid.

Serve

  1. Serve with pale yellow tulips on each plate.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  5. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 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
Break down when cooked to give the base its soft body and natural sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and keeps the frozen texture softer by lowering the freezing point.
Pineapple juice
Adds bright, tangy fruit flavor and acidity to balance the sweetness.
Orange juice
Adds citrus sweetness and aroma along with extra liquid for the frappe.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and keeps the fruit taste lively.

The step that matters

Cool the strained mixture before adding the juices and freezing. A warm base can melt the ice mixture unevenly and form larger ice crystals. Cooling it fully helps the frappe freeze smoothly and keeps its texture even.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar, pineapple, orange. 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

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes