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Dessert

Banana and Apple Tart

A fruit tart made with sliced apples and bananas, covered in a buttered flour crust and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and banana match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 435 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana and Apple Tart

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine flour and butter to make a crust.

  3. Slice the apples and bananas, then place them in a dish.

  4. Add sugar and syrup (if using) to the fruit and mix gently.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover the fruit with the crust, then brush melted butter on top.

  2. Sprinkle sugar over the crust and bake for 20 minutes or until 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. Apple + bananatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together435 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Flour + sugartop 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the crust as it binds with butter and bakes firm.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and flaky, and helps it brown.
Apples
Provide the main fruit body and tart flavour that holds shape when baked.
Bananas
Soften as they bake, adding moisture and natural sweetness to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the top crust caramelise to a golden colour.

The step that matters

Sprinkle sugar over the crust and bake until golden. Sugar browns through caramelisation and the Maillard reaction at oven heat, so the top turns golden. Watch the colour, since sugar can darken quickly and scorch.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, banana, sugar, 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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