Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Pudding

A sweet custard-like dessert made with bananas, sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla, and served warm with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Vanilla and banana are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,430 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Banana Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil sugar and water in a pot.

  2. Mix flour with a little water until smooth, then add to the boiling mixture.

  3. Stir in the egg yolks and salt.

  4. Add vanilla extract and mix well.

  5. Slice the bananas and fold them into the hot mixture.

  6. Gently fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with 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. Vanilla + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  4. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and enrich its texture as they set with gentle heat.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they add lightness and airy structure to the pudding.
Flour
Starch thickens the boiling liquid so the pudding holds its body.
Bananas
Add fruity flavor and soft moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Folding rather than stirring keeps the air trapped in the whites, so the pudding stays light instead of deflating into a dense, flat texture.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Blueberryfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

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

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesBanana FillingBanana Filling16 recipesBanana SherbetBanana Sherbet10 recipesBanana FloatBanana Float9 recipes