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Baked Bananas

A simple oven-baked banana dish sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Baked Bananas

Why it works: Banana and wine work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 244 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Baked Bananas

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Select large red bananas and strip off one section of the skin.

  3. Loosen the remaining skin and place the bananas in a baking pan with the uncovered side up.

  4. Sprinkle the bananas with granulated sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 30 minutes.

  2. If using wine, pour 1 tablespoon over each banana 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Banana + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together244 recipes

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

  2. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Large red bananas
Form the main body of the dish; the flesh softens and turns tender as it bakes.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the surface caramelize and brown in the oven.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, wine. 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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