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Dessert

Banana Compote

A compote of sliced red bananas simmered in a sugar syrup, served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 Compote

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and water to make a syrup.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil and let it boil rapidly for 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the syrup over the sliced red bananas until covered.

  2. Allow the syrup to cool, then serve the bananas with whipped 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Banana + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the bananas.
Red bananas
Provide the fruit that softens and absorbs the sweet syrup.
Whipped cream
Adds a light, cool, creamy contrast when served with the warm or cooled bananas.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup for 10 minutes. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the sugar, so the syrup thickens as it cools. Too short a boil leaves a thin syrup that won't coat the bananas well.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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