Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Salad

A fruit salad of sliced bananas, pineapple, citrus juice, and curacao, garnished with preserved strawberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and slice the bananas.

  2. Open the tin of pineapple and drain the fruit.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange the bananas and pineapple in alternate layers in a glass dish, piling them high.

  2. Mix the orange and lemon juice, sweeten to taste, and add the curacao or preferred liquor.

  3. Pour the mixture over the fruit.

  4. Decorate with preserved strawberries and keep in a cool place until 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  5. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the main body and sweetness of the salad.
Pineapple
Adds juicy texture and a tangy sweetness between the banana layers.
Orange and lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness that balances the sweetness of the fruit.
Curacao or preferred liquor
Adds aroma and a boozy flavour to the juice mixture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, pineapple, orange. 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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes