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Dessert

Banana Float

A chilled dessert of banana, gelatin, milk, sugar, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Banana Float

Why it works: Banana and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,430 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Banana Float

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Boil the sweet milk and sugar together.

  3. Dip out a little boiling milk and stir it into the gelatine.

  4. Stir this mixture back into the rest of the milk and boil for 10 minutes.

Add bananas and chill

  1. When cool, stir in the bananas broken into pieces with a silver fork and mix thoroughly.

  2. Set the mixture on ice.

Finish and serve

  1. An hour before serving, sweeten the cream to taste, flavor with vanilla, and whip it well.

  2. Place the frozen banana mixture in a glass dish and top with the whipped cream.

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 + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Gelatine
Sets the milk mixture into a soft, sliceable structure as it chills.
Bananas
Add banana flavor, sweetness and soft texture to the mixture.
Rich cream
Whipped on top, it adds richness and a light, airy topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the milk and softens the set texture of the float.
Sweet milk
Forms the main body of the float and carries the gelatine and sugar.

The step that matters

Dip out a little boiling milk and stir it into the gelatine. Gelatine clumps if it meets hot liquid in bulk. Tempering it with a small amount of hot milk first helps it disperse evenly before it is combined with the rest of the milk.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, cream, vanilla. 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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