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Banana Salad

A salad of peeled bananas rolled in nuts, served on lettuce with mayonnaise and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 174 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bananas

  1. Peel and scrape the bananas.

  2. Cut the bananas in half crosswise.

  3. Roll the banana halves in chopped nuts.

Assemble and serve

  1. Serve on lettuce leaves.

  2. Mix mayonnaise with whipped cream and drizzle over the salad.

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. Nuts + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

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

  3. Banana + nutstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).

  4. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. 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 sweet, soft fruit base of the salad.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch that contrasts with the soft banana.
Mayonnaise
Adds richness and a creamy, fatty texture to the dressing.
Whipped cream
Lightens the dressing and makes it smoother and airier.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nuts, 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.

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