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Dessert

Banana Salad

A chilled dessert of sliced bananas topped with sherry wine, sugar, lemon juice, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and sherry work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 117 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice bananas lengthwise into thick slices.

  2. Arrange slices on a dish with ends meeting to form a hollow center.

Dress and chill

  1. Mix sherry wine, sugar, and lemon juice; pour over bananas.

  2. Chill until ice cold.

Serve

  1. Fill the center with whipped cream, piled high.

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 + sherrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Banana + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together244 recipes

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

  5. Banana + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

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 sweet, soft texture of the salad.
Sherry wine
Adds aromatic depth and flavour to the chilled bananas.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and slows browning of the bananas.
Whipped cream
Adds rich fat and a light, airy texture to the centre of the salad.

The step that matters

Chill until ice cold. Cold temperatures firm the banana slices and mellow the sherry's sharp alcohol flavour, so the salad tastes balanced and holds its shape.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, sherry, wine, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sherry, wine, sugar, cream. 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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