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Dessert

Banana Pudding

A baked dessert made with a thin batter, bananas, sugar, and butter, served warm with cream or vanilla sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Banana Pudding

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).

Make and bake the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix sugar, eggs, water, butter, and baking powder.

  2. Add flour gradually to create a thin, smooth batter.

  3. Pour the batter into two deep tins and bake until golden.

Assemble and serve

  1. Slice the bananas and layer them between the baked layers with a sprinkling of sugar.

  2. Serve warm with thin cream or a slightly sour vanilla-flavored sauce.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + bananatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,536 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the baked layers structure as they set.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and turn light.
Flour
Forms the batter's structure, which sets into the baked layers.
Butter
Adds fat, contributing tenderness and richness to the layers.
Bananas
Add moisture and sweet banana flavour between the layers.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

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