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Dessert

Banana Pudding

A sweet dessert made with gelatin, milk, cream, sugar, and bananas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Banana Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Dissolve gelatin in ½ cup cold water.

  2. Scald milk and sugar in a saucepan.

  3. Thin gelatin with a little warm milk, then strain and add to the rest of the milk.

  4. Let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Allow to cool, and before it hardens, add bananas cut into pieces with a silver knife.

  2. Whip the cream and sweeten it.

  3. Prepare this a day before serving.

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

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

  2. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + bananatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sparkling gelatine
Sets the milk mixture into a soft, sliceable body that holds the bananas in place.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps dissolve the milk base smoothly.
Milk
Forms the main liquid base that the gelatine sets into a creamy pudding.
Cream
Adds richness and a light, airy texture when whipped and folded in.
Bananas
Provide the characteristic banana flavour and soft fruit pieces in the set pudding.

The step that matters

Add the bananas before the mixture hardens. If the gelatine sets too far, the bananas will not distribute evenly and the texture becomes stiff. Adding them while the mixture is cooled but still fluid keeps them suspended throughout.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, 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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