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Dessert

Fried Bananas

Fried bananas are sliced bananas fried in butter, seasoned with lemon juice and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and banana are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,536 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Fried Bananas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Peel the bananas and sprinkle them with lemon juice and salt.

Fry and serve

  1. Place the bananas in the skillet and fry until light brown, turning several times.

  2. Serve warm.

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. Butter + bananatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,536 recipes

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

  2. Banana + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the main body and natural sweetness, and brown as their sugars caramelize in the hot pan.
Butter
Adds fat that conducts heat evenly and gives the bananas a rich, toasty flavor as it browns.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps slow the bananas from darkening before cooking.

The step that matters

Fry until light brown, turning several times. Medium heat lets the sugars in the bananas caramelize to a golden color without burning the outside. Turning them often exposes every side evenly, so the fruit warms through without going mushy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, banana. 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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