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Custard with Bananas

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and ginger work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 206 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Custard with Bananas

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare custard and flavor it with a pinch of ginger.

  2. Pour the custard over sliced bananas.

  3. Let it stand until completely cold.

  4. Whip the egg whites to a very stiff froth.

  5. Heap the whipped egg whites on top of the custard.

  6. Sprinkle with sugar and serve.

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 + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together206 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Banana + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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