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Dessert

Banana Pie

A pie with sweet milk custard filling, sliced bananas, and a meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and banana are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,430 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Banana Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the crust

  1. Mix flour, ice water, and lard to form dough.

  2. Bake the dough until golden.

Make the filling

  1. Cook sweet milk, sugar, vanilla, egg yolks, and flour together in a double boiler until thick.

Assemble and top

  1. Cover the baked crust with a layer of sliced bananas.

  2. Pour the filling over the bananas.

  3. Beat egg whites with sugar until stiff.

  4. Spread the meringue on top of the pie.

  5. Bake until the meringue is golden brown.

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. Vanilla + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  5. Vanilla + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard filling and add richness and color.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms the meringue topping.
Flour
Thickens the custard filling and gives structure to the pie crust.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and flaky.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilize the meringue.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard in the double boiler until thick. Gentle, indirect heat lets the egg yolks and flour thicken the milk slowly. Overheating can curdle the eggs or leave the starch lumpy, so the filling needs steady attention until it coats a spoon.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, vanilla, egg, flour. 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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