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Dessert

Banana Salad

A fruit salad of sliced bananas topped with orange juice, coconut, almonds, and a red currant jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 549 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bananas

  1. Peel and slice the bananas, then dust with castor sugar.

  2. Squeeze the juice of the sweet orange over the bananas.

  3. Let the bananas stand for about an hour before serving.

Make the sauce

  1. To make the sauce, dissolve the red currant jelly in water over low heat.

  2. Add orange juice and orange zest to the sauce, along with shredded almonds or desiccated coconut.

Serve

  1. Sprinkle with freshly grated coconut and serve with cream.

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 + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Coconut + almondtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Orange + red curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the main body and natural sweetness of the salad.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the bananas and draws out some of their juice.
Red currant jelly
Dissolves into the sauce to add sweetness and a glossy body.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and fresh citrus flavour that balances the sweetness.
Orange zest
Adds aromatic citrus oil and a fine bitter edge to the sauce.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar, orange, coconut, cream, almond. 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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