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Dessert

Compote of Bananas

A compote made by boiling bananas and coating them with orange syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,118 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Compote of Bananas

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the peel and threads from the bananas.

  2. Cover the bananas with boiling water for a few seconds, then drain.

  3. Coat each banana with orange syrup.

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 + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  2. Banana + syruptop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Orange + syruptop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,179 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Very ripe bananas
Provide the main body, sweetness and soft texture of the compote.
Orange syrup
Adds sweetness and citrus aroma that coats each banana.

The step that matters

Cover the bananas with boiling water for a few seconds, then drain.. Brief blanching loosens the skin and sets the banana surface, while longer exposure would make the fruit mushy and waterlogged. Draining well keeps the syrup from being diluted.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, syrup. 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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