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Salad

Cranberry and Banana Salad

A salad of cranberries, bananas, and raw celery, thickened with cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and celery work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 128 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Cranberry and Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cranberry sauce

  1. Cook the cranberries until soft.

  2. Strain the cranberries to remove skins.

  3. Thicken the cranberry juice with a little cornstarch.

Assemble and serve

  1. Cool the mixture and pour it over sliced bananas.

  2. Serve with raw celery.

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 + celerytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together128 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Cranberries
Provide the tart fruit flavor and the juice that forms the sauce.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cranberry juice into a glossy, spoonable sauce as it heats and cools.
Bananas
Provide sweet, soft fruit that contrasts with the tart cranberry sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the cranberry juice with cornstarch. Cornstarch must be heated with liquid to swell and thicken. If it is added without enough heat or stirring, it can clump or stay thin, so the sauce will not coat the bananas properly.

“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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