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Dessert

Banana Salad

A salad of small bananas coated in beaten egg white and rolled in chopped salted peanuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and peanut work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 308 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Select small bananas.

  2. Dip the bananas in the beaten egg white.

  3. Roll the bananas in the chopped salted peanuts.

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. Banana + peanuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

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

  2. Banana + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Egg + peanuttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Small bananas
Provide the soft, sweet fruit base that the coating clings to.
Egg white
Acts as a sticky binder so the chopped peanuts adhere to the bananas.
Salted peanuts
Add a crunchy, salty, fatty coating that contrasts with the soft fruit.

The step that matters

Coat the bananas evenly in egg white before rolling. The beaten egg white is the adhesive. If it is patchy or too thin, the peanuts will not stick evenly and the coating will fall off. Drain any excess so the peanuts do not slide off and become greasy or soggy in the egg white.

Swap the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, egg):

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Hazelnutfits about as well
  3. Peanutthe original
  4. Walnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, egg. 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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