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Dessert

Banana Cream Pie

A pie with a puff pastry crust filled with sliced bananas and a custard made from egg yolks, sugar, and cream, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Banana Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Line a pie dish with the puff pastry and half-bake it.

  3. Fill the crust with sliced bananas.

Make the custard and bake

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with sugar, then add cream or milk and pour over the bananas.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes.

Top with meringue

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff, sweeten, and add flavouring.

  2. Pile the meringue on top of the pie and return to the oven to set.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + bananatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard and whites whip into the meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and stabilises the whipped egg whites.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and moisture to the custard filling.
Bananas
Provide the main fruit flavour and soft texture in the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms the crust that holds the filling in the pie dish.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg whites. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff, and any trace of yolk or grease will stop them from reaching full volume. Stiff whites hold the meringue's shape and set into a light topping in the oven.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, cream, lemon. 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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