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Dessert

Banana Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from bananas and thin cream, sweetened with sugar and optionally sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and sherry work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 117 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Banana Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ice cream

  1. Make ice cream according to your preferred method.

  2. Once frozen, gently stir in the sliced bananas.

  3. Pack the mixture into a mold.

Alternative method

  1. Grate 10 ripe bananas (alternative method).

  2. Mix the grated bananas with the thin cream.

  3. Sweeten to taste, then freeze.

Finish

  1. Stir in some fresh sliced banana.

  2. Repack the cream.

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. Banana + sherrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Cream + sherrytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + sherrytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,141 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

Bananas
Add sweetness, flavor and moisture, and give the frozen dessert its banana character.
Thin cream
Provides fat, which keeps the frozen texture smooth and creamy rather than icy.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.

The step that matters

Stir in the bananas gently once frozen. Folding sliced banana into partly frozen cream keeps the fruit in distinct pieces. Overworking the mixture can break down its frozen structure and make it icier and wetter.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, sherry. 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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