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Salad

Banana Salad

A chilled fruit salad of sliced bananas mixed with claret, pineapple and orange juice, sugar, water, served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the bananas and place them in a bowl.

  2. Pour the claret, pineapple juice, orange juice, sugar, and water over the bananas.

Chill and serve

  1. Set the mixture on ice to cool for 2 hours.

  2. Serve the salad on a bed of lettuce.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  4. Pineapple + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together271 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. 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
Form the body of the salad and soften as they soak in the juices.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves into the juices to form a light syrup.
Claret
Adds wine flavour and acidity to the fruit.
Pineapple juice
Adds acidity and bright fruit flavour.
Orange juice
Adds acidity, sweetness and citrus aroma.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

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