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Dessert

Banana Fritters

Fried banana pieces coated in a batter of flour, milk, egg, and butter, sweetened 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 sugar and lemon juice, cover, and let stand for 20 minutes.

Make the batter

  1. For the batter, mix and sift salt and flour, then add milk and the well-beaten yolk of the egg, followed by melted butter.

  2. Beat the mixture thoroughly and fold in the stiffly beaten egg white.

Fry and serve

  1. Drain the bananas, dip them in the batter, and fry in deep fat until golden.

  2. Drain the fritters, sprinkle with fruit sugar, and 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 batter's structure so it coats the bananas and holds together when fried.
Egg
The yolk enriches the batter and the whipped white lightens it for a airy texture.
Milk
Liquid that hydrates the flour into a smooth batter that browns in frying.
Bananas
The main filling; their natural sugars soften and sweeten as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the batter.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiffly beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the whipped egg white's air in the batter, so the fritters stay light instead of turning dense.

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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