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Dessert

Banana Pudding

A custard dessert made with milk, butter, eggs, sugar, cornstarch, gelatin, bananas, and a pinch of sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Banana Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk and butter in a saucepan.

  2. In a bowl, mix the well-beaten yolks with sugar and cornstarch.

  3. Dissolve the gelatine in 3 tablespoons of milk.

  4. Add the dissolved gelatine to the egg whites.

  5. Whip the mixture into the hot milk.

Layer and chill

  1. Once the mixture is cold, layer custard and sliced bananas in a dish, repeating until full, with custard on top.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  3. Butter + bananatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,536 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it thicken as it cooks.
Cornstarch
Thickens the custard so it holds its shape between layers.
Gelatine
Sets the pudding so the layers firm up as it cools.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the banana flavour.
Bananas
Add fruity flavour and soft texture between the custard layers.

The step that matters

Layering only once the mixture is cold. Gelatine sets as it cools, so layering while the custard is still warm can blur the layers and leave the pudding runny. Waiting until it is cold lets it firm enough to hold clean layers.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, 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.

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