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Dessert

Banana Fritters

Fried banana pieces coated in a batter of flour, milk, and egg, served with fruit sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Banana Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bananas

  1. Remove skins from bananas, scrape, and cut into quarters.

  2. Sprinkle bananas with fruit sugar and lemon juice, cover, and let stand for 20 minutes.

Make the batter

  1. Sift salt and flour together.

  2. Mix the sifted salt and flour.

  3. Add milk to the mixture.

  4. Add the well-beaten yolk of the egg.

  5. Add melted butter.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg white.

Fry and serve

  1. Drain the bananas.

  2. Dip the bananas in the batter.

  3. Fry the battered bananas in deep fat until golden.

  4. Drain the fritters.

  5. Sprinkle the fritters with fruit sugar.

  6. 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Banana + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the body of the batter that coats and holds the banana.
Egg
Yolk enriches and binds the batter; beaten white adds lightness and helps it puff.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter a smooth, pourable consistency.
Bananas
Soft, sweet fruit core that softens and turns tender inside the crisp coating.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the whipped white's air in the batter so the coating stays light instead of dense after frying.

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, milk, lemon, egg, flour, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, lemon, egg, flour, butter. 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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