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Dessert

Baked Bananas

A simple oven-baked banana dessert with butter, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Baked Bananas

Why it works: Banana and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,536 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Baked Bananas

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

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

  2. Peel and cut the bananas in half lengthwise and place them on a buttered dish.

  3. In a bowl, mix the butter, sugar, and lemon juice to create the dressing.

Bake and serve

  1. Baste the bananas with half of the dressing.

  2. Bake for 15 minutes.

  3. Baste with the remaining dressing and bake for an additional 15 minutes.

  4. Serve hot or cold.

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 + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,536 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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 of the dish, softening as they bake in the oven.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the bananas brown as their surface caramelizes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and helping the dressing coat the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the rich dressing.

The step that matters

Basting with the dressing. Basting keeps the cut surfaces moist and coated with butter and sugar, so they brown evenly rather than drying out. Splitting the dressing between two rounds spreads that coating across the whole bake.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, butter, sugar. 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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