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Bananas with Currant Juice

Bananas served with currant juice and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and currant work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 39 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Bananas with Currant Juice

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the bananas into 1‑inch thick slices and place them on a dish.

  2. Sprinkle the sugar over the bananas.

  3. Add the currant juice.

  4. Prepare the night before and set in a cool place.

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 + curranttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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 fruit body and natural sweetness that the dish is built around.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps draw juices out of the fruit.
Currant juice
Supplies moisture and tart flavor that soaks into the banana slices.

The step that matters

Set in a cool place the night before. Chilling gives the banana slices time to absorb the currant juice and sugar, so the flavors blend and the fruit firms slightly. Serving too soon leaves the dish wet and less flavorful.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, 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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