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Dessert

Banana Pie

A pie with a bottom crust, banana slices, custard filling, and frosted egg whites.

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 Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crust

  1. Bake the bottom pie crust until golden.

Make the custard

  1. Combine milk, sugar, corn starch, and egg yolks in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring until thickened.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the custard over the sliced bananas in the crust.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then spread over the custard.

  3. Bake the pie at 350°F (175°C) until the frosting browns.

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. Banana + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  3. Banana + corntop 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set with heat.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, sliceable custard when heated.
Egg whites
Whipped into a meringue topping that sets and browns in the oven.
Bananas
Add fruit flavor and sweetness beneath the custard.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard until thickened. Corn starch thickens only when the mixture reaches a boil and is stirred constantly, so undercooking leaves a runny custard. Egg yolks can scramble if overheated, so keep the heat medium and stir steadily.

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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