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Banana Pancakes

A batter of mashed bananas, eggs, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, butter, and milk cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Banana Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Rub the bananas through a sieve.

  2. Add the well-beaten eggs and remaining ingredients.

  3. Mix in enough milk to make a thin batter.

Cook

  1. Cook on a griddle as usual.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Bananas
Provide moisture, sweetness and banana flavour that carries the batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the pancakes set.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pancakes as it hydrates and sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the pancakes rise and stay light.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the pancakes brown and taste rounded.

The step that matters

Cook on a griddle as usual.. Batter spreads and cooks unevenly if the griddle is too cool or too hot. Medium heat lets the centre set before the outside browns, so flip only when bubbles form and the edges look dry.

Swap the banana

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

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

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