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Dessert

Banana Fritters

Fried or baked banana fritters coated in flour, served with a boiled syrup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Banana Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the bananas and cut them in half.

  2. Soak the banana pieces in a mixture of sugar and water for 1–2 hours.

  3. Remove the bananas from the syrup and roll them in flour to coat well.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry in hot lard or bake until golden brown and crisp.

  2. Boil the remaining syrup and strain it to serve as sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Banana + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,725 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the soft, sweet filling that sits inside the crisp coating.
Sugar
Sweetens the soaking syrup and adds sweetness to the sauce.
Flour
Coats the bananas so the outside can brown and crisp when fried or baked.

The step that matters

Fry in hot lard or bake until golden brown and crisp. Frying or baking at the right heat sets the flour coating quickly, so it browns and crisps instead of absorbing fat or steaming soft. Oil that is not hot enough makes the fritters greasy.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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