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Dessert

Banana Cream Ice

A chilled dessert made with custard, cream, bananas, lemon juice, and Curacao or brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and brandy work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 100 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Banana Cream Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pass the bananas through a fine sieve.

  2. Prepare the custard as directed and let it cool.

  3. Whip the cream until stiff.

Make and freeze

  1. Add the banana pulp, lemon juice, and Curacao to the cooled custard.

  2. Gently stir in the whipped cream.

  3. Freeze the mixture for 2 to 2½ hours.

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. Banana + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Cream + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

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

  4. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Cream + bananatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Custard
Forms the creamy base that the other ingredients are folded into.
Cream
Whipped to add air and lightness, giving the frozen texture a softer body.
Bananas
Provide the banana flavour and pulp that sweetens and thickens the mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the banana flavour and balances sweetness.

The step that matters

Gently stir in the whipped cream. Whipped cream holds air that gives the ice a light texture. Vigorous stirring knocks that air out, leaving the frozen result dense and heavy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, banana, brandy. 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.

More banana cream ice recipes

Cream 4

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