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Dessert

Banana Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from cream, milk, sugar, egg yolks, and mashed bananas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Banana Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Beat the egg yolks in a bowl and mix in the sugar.

  3. Add the beaten yolks and sugar to the scalded milk, stirring until it thickens.

  4. Remove from heat and let cool, then stir in the cream.

Add bananas and freeze

  1. Mash the bananas through a fruit press and mix into the cooled mixture.

  2. Freeze the mixture immediately.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 and add richness as they set gently with the warm milk.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Bananas
Add banana flavour and body once mashed into the cooled base.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the yolks thicken into a custard.

The step that matters

Add the beaten yolks and sugar to the scalded milk, stirring until it thickens. Egg yolks can scramble if added to hot milk too quickly or left over heat. Stirring steadily while adding them thickens the custard smoothly instead of curdling it.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

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