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Dessert

Banana Pie

A baked pie with sliced bananas, sugar, and pineapple pieces in a pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. 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

  1. Line a pie plate with pastry.

  2. Slice the bananas and place them in the crust.

  3. Sprinkle with sugar and add small pieces of pineapple.

  4. Cover with an upper crust.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 to 60 minutes.

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 + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the main fruit filling and soft, sweet texture when baked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps draw moisture from the fruit into the filling.
Pastry
Forms the crust that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
Pineapple
Adds juicy fruit flavour and acidity to the filling.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Bananathe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pineapple. 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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