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Salad

Banana Salad

A salad of lettuce and sliced bananas dressed with lemon juice and olive oil, optionally topped with rye nuts or Grape-nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and rye share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Arrange lettuce and sliced bananas in a salad bowl.

  2. In a small bowl, mix lemon juice and olive oil to make a French dressing.

  3. Drizzle the dressing over the salad.

  4. Sprinkle rye nuts or Grape-nuts on top if desired.

  5. Scrape the inside of the banana skins and mix it with 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. Lettuce + ryetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

  5. Olive + ryetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness to the French dressing, carrying flavor across the leaves.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and helps keep sliced banana from browning.

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, lemon, olive, rye):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, lemon, olive, rye. 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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