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Dessert

Baked Bananas

A baked banana dessert with sugar, lemon juice, hot water, and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Baked Bananas

Why it works: Banana and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,134 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Baked Bananas

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. Peel the bananas and cut them in half lengthwise.

  3. Place the bananas in a well-buttered baking tin.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the bananas with sugar and lemon juice.

  2. Bake for 10 minutes.

  3. Add hot water and currant jelly to the baking tin.

  4. Transfer the bananas to a glass dish and pour the jelly over them.

  5. Let cool before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

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

  3. Banana + curranttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  5. Lemon + curranttop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Bananas
Provide the main body and sweetness that soften and caramelize in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the bananas and helps them brown at the surface as they bake.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Currant jelly
Melts into the hot water to form a sweet, glossy sauce around the bananas.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar, 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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