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Dessert

Banana Pie

A pie made with sliced bananas, sugar, butter, allspice, and boiled cider or jelly, topped with a crust and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and cider work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Slice the bananas raw.

  2. Sprinkle with sugar, butter, allspice, and boiled cider or jelly.

  3. Cover with pie crust.

Bake

  1. Bake until the crust is golden.

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 + cidertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43 recipes

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

  2. Allspice + cidertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together873 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Banana + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  4. Banana + allspicetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 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
Form the soft, sweet filling that bakes into the pie.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling take on color as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounder flavor to the filling.
Boiled cider or jelly
Adds concentrated fruit sweetness and a tangy flavor.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the pie's base and top.

The step that matters

Bake until the crust is golden.. Golden browning shows the crust has baked through, since pastry browns as its sugars and starches caramelize and its fat sets the layers. Pulling the pie early can leave the crust pale and doughy.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar, butter, cider. 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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