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Dessert

Acidulated Bananas

Bananas soaked in lemon juice, ice water, and sugar, then chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,134 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Acidulated Bananas

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the bananas and place them in a glass dish.

  2. Squeeze the lemon juice over the bananas.

Macerate

  1. Add the ice water and sugar.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 30 minutes in a cold 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 + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar 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 fruit base that softens and releases juice as it stands in the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and slows browning of the cut bananas.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps draw liquid out of the fruit to form a syrup.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand in a cold place. Sugar draws juice out of the banana slices over time, and the cold slows spoilage and softening. Stand time is what builds the syrup, so cutting it short leaves the fruit dry and undersweetened.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, 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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