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Dessert

Banana Pie

A pie with a baked crust filled with sliced bananas and sugar, topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Banana Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a rich pie crust and bake it.

  2. Fill the baked crust with sliced bananas.

  3. Sprinkle ½ cup of white sugar over the bananas.

Finish and serve

  1. Place the pie in the oven for a few moments to soften the fruit.

  2. Cover with whipped cream and serve immediately.

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

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

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

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

  3. Banana + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the main fruit flavor and a soft, creamy texture once heated.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and draws some juice out of the bananas.
Whipped cream
Adds fat and a light, cool creaminess that contrasts with the warm fruit.

The step that matters

Warming the pie briefly. Heat softens the bananas, but too long in the oven can turn them mushy and collapse the crust's texture. Whipped cream is stable only when cold, so it softens and loses volume if added to warm fruit or left sitting, which is why it is served right after being added.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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