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Dessert

Banana Fritters

A fried banana batter snack made with sweet milk, flour, baking powder, salt, and bananas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and banana are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,470 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix sweet milk, flour, baking powder, and salt until smooth.

Prepare the bananas

  1. Cut each banana into three pieces and slice each piece lengthwise.

  2. Dip the banana pieces into the batter using a fork.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop the battered bananas into boiling fat and fry until golden.

  2. Serve immediately on a hot platter with fruit sauce.

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

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

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + bananatop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,725 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the batter's structure once heated, helping the fritters hold together in the fat.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the coating light and puffed rather than dense.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and makes a smooth, coating batter.
Bananas
Soften and sweeten as they cook, giving the fritters their moist, fruity centre.

The step that matters

Drop the battered bananas into boiling fat and fry until golden.. If the fat is not hot enough, the batter absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisping quickly. Frying in hot fat sets the coating fast, so it browns and stays light.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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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