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Salad

Egg and Banana Salad

A salad of boiled eggs and sliced bananas served on lettuce with French dressing or mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Egg and Banana Salad

2 eggs per person

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil enough eggs to provide 2 eggs for each person.

  2. Once hard, cool the eggs, remove the shells, and slice them.

Assemble and serve

  1. Combine the sliced eggs with sliced bananas.

  2. Serve the mixture on a bed of lettuce with either French dressing or mayonnaise.

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

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

  2. Egg + bananatop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the firm, sliceable body and mild richness of the salad.
Bananas
Add natural sweetness and a soft, creamy texture against the firm egg.
French dressing or mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture that bind the mixture and carry its flavor.

The step that matters

Cool the eggs promptly after boiling. Overcooked eggs develop a grey-green ring around the yolk from a reaction between sulfur and iron. Cooling them quickly stops the cooking, keeping the yolks bright and the whites tender enough to slice cleanly.

Swap the lettuce

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, banana. 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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