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Dessert

Banana Pudding

A gelatin dessert with sliced bananas, citrus juice, sugar, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Banana Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatin

  1. Dissolve ¼ box of gelatin in 1½ cups of cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Add 1½ cups of boiling water, the juice of 2 oranges, 1 lemon, and 2 cups of sugar.

  3. Strain into a mold.

  4. Let it stand until it begins to thicken.

  5. Stir in 6 thinly sliced bananas.

Set and serve

  1. When sufficiently firm, turn out of the mold.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Gelatin + creamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Gelatin + sugartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Gelatin
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable body as it cools.
Bananas
Add fruit flavour and soft texture to the set gelatin.
Sugar
Sweetens the citrus juice and balances its acidity.
Orange juice
Adds fruity flavour and some acidity to the gelatin.

The step that matters

Let it stand until it begins to thicken. Stirring in bananas too early, while the gelatin is still liquid, lets the fruit float and settle unevenly. Waiting until it thickens keeps the bananas suspended through the set.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against gelatin, orange, lemon, sugar, 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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