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Dessert

Banana Sauce

A sweet sauce made from sugar, water, corn starch, butter, and mashed ripe banana.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,345 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Banana Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Make a syrup by boiling sugar and water together.

  2. Thicken the syrup with corn-starch mixed in a little cold water.

  3. Stir in the butter.

  4. Mash the banana and beat it into the sauce.

Serve

  1. Use the sauce as soon as it cools.

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. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + bananatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into boiling water to form the syrup base and provides sweetness.
Corn-starch
Swells when heated in the syrup, thickening the sauce into a smooth, pourable body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Banana
Contributes banana flavour, natural sweetness and soft body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the syrup with the cornstarch slurry. Cornstarch must be mixed with cold water first, or it clumps when it hits hot syrup. Once the starch granules are evenly dispersed and heated, they swell and thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, corn, butter. 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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