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Salad

Banana and Celery Salad

A salad of sliced bananas and celery mixed with mayonnaise and nuts, served chilled on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Banana and Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the bananas and celery.

  2. Mix with mayonnaise and chopped nuts.

  3. Fill the banana skins with the mixture.

Chill and serve

  1. Chill and serve on lettuce leaves.

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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).

  5. Nuts + celerytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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 body that holds the filling.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the chopped ingredients into a creamy mixture.
Celery
Adds a crisp, fresh texture that contrasts with the soft banana.
Nuts
Add crunch and a toasty, rich flavour to the soft filling.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against nuts, celery, lettuce. 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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