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Dessert

Banana Custard

A custard made with bananas, cornflour, milk, sugar, and egg, served hot or cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,470 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the bananas, then sprinkle with sugar.

  2. Mix the cornflour with the milk in a saucepan.

Make the custard

  1. Add the sugar and stir until the mixture thickens.

  2. Remove from heat and carefully stir in the beaten egg.

  3. Return to low heat for 2 to 3 minutes, ensuring it does not boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the custard over the bananas and serve hot or cold.

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

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

  2. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 the main fruit flavour, sweetness and soft texture of the dish.
Cornflour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells on heating, giving the custard body.
Egg
Enriches the custard and helps thicken it as its proteins set on gentle heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornflour thickens and the egg enriches.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws juice from the bananas when sprinkled over them.

The step that matters

Return to low heat without boiling. Once the egg is stirred in, high heat or boiling can scramble the egg proteins, leaving the custard grainy or split instead of smooth.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, 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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