Skip to main content
Main

Banana and Nut Salad

A salad of bananas coated in syrup and nuts, served on lettuce and topped with candied cherries and cream dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Banana and Nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine water and sugar in a saucepan and boil for 5-6 minutes.

  2. Add lemon juice and boil for an additional 2-3 minutes.

Prepare and coat the bananas

  1. Peel the bananas and scrape off coarse threads with a sharp knife.

  2. Roll the bananas in the cold syrup.

  3. Roll the bananas in chopped nuts until fully coated.

Serve

  1. Serve the bananas on crisp lettuce leaves.

  2. Drizzle with cream dressing and sprinkle with small pieces of candied cherries.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  4. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  5. Banana + lettucetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together198 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens and lightly glazes the bananas.
Bananas
Provide the soft, sweet fruit that forms the body of the salad.
English walnuts or pecans
Add crunch and a contrasting toasted, nutty flavor to the soft bananas.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps slow browning of the fruit.

The step that matters

Roll the bananas in the cold syrup. Bananas darken quickly once cut or peeled. Coating them promptly in lemon-acidified syrup slows oxidation and helps them keep a fresh color before the nuts are added.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, walnut, lettuce, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCreamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes