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Banana Salad

A chilled banana salad with lemon-sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,134 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Cook the sugar and water together for 5 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add the lemon juice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Slice the bananas very thinly into a salad bowl.

  2. Pour the syrup over the bananas and let stand for 1 to 2 hours 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.

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 + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Bananas
Form the body of the salad and absorb the syrup as it stands.
Sugar
Dissolves in water to make a sweet syrup that flavours and moistens the bananas.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps slow browning of the sliced bananas.

The step that matters

Let the syrup cool before adding the lemon juice. Hot syrup would soften the thin banana slices too quickly once poured over them, and heat dulls the fresh, bright aroma of lemon juice. Cooling first keeps the fruit firm and the citrus flavour lively.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar. 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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