Name: Banana Salad
Ingredients: bananas; lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise or Boiled Dressing

Why it works: Banana and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 198 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

bananas
lettuce leaves
Mayonnaise or Boiled Dressing

Directions

Remove the skins from the bananas.
Arrange the bananas, either whole or halved lengthwise, on the lettuce leaves.
Add 1 tablespoon of Mayonnaise or Boiled Dressing on each banana.

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.

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

Bananas: Provide the sweet, soft fruit that forms the body of the salad.
Lettuce leaves: Give a crisp, cool base that holds the bananas.
Mayonnaise or boiled dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the bananas with moisture and richness.

“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.