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Dessert

Banana Blanc Mange

A custard made with milk, sugar, corn starch, bananas, and whipped egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Banana Blanc Mange

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dissolve the corn-starch in cold water.

  2. Bring the milk to a boil and add the dissolved corn-starch.

  3. Stir until the mixture thickens.

  4. Add the sugar and bananas that have been pressed through a sieve.

  5. Fold in the stiffly whipped egg white.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

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

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

  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

Corn-starch
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard as it heats and gelatinises.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and carries the thickened structure.
Bananas
Add banana flavour and body once pressed into a smooth purée.
Egg white
Whipped and folded in to lighten the custard and add airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the flavour of the bananas.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly whipped egg white.. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whipped white; stirring hard deflates them and leaves the custard dense rather than light.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, corn, 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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