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Bananas As a Vegetable

Fried bananas served with white sauce and roast mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bananas As a Vegetable

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the bananas

  1. Boil half-ripe bananas in milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, for 20-30 minutes.

  2. In a separate pan, make a white sauce by melting butter, adding flour, and whisking in the milk from the bananas.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip cooked bananas in beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the coated bananas in hot oil until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve the fried bananas with roast mutton and the white sauce.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Bananas
Half-ripe bananas hold their shape when boiled and provide the sweet, starchy filling inside the crust.
Milk
Simmering the bananas in milk gives them moisture and a soft texture, and the same milk thickens the white sauce.
Butter
Butter melted with flour forms the roux that gives the white sauce body and a rich flavour.
Flour
Flour thickens the melted butter into a roux, which sets the white sauce.
Egg
Beaten egg acts as a binder so the bread crumbs adhere to the bananas.
Bread crumbs
Bread crumbs form a crisp outer coating that browns when fried in hot oil.

The step that matters

Coating the bananas before frying. Bananas must be dried and evenly coated in egg and crumbs; wet or thin coating can fall off or steam instead of crisping in hot oil, so the crust stays pale and loose.

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, pepper, butter, flour, egg, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, pepper, butter, flour, egg, bread. 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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