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Banana Salad
Add one dessert-spoonful of oil by degrees to an equal quantity of vinegar, mixing carefully till they are thoroughly incorporated, then add a tea-spoonful of sugar. Peel three bananas, which should be quite ripe, and slice them across in equal slices of medium thickness, place them in a dish and pour the dressing over them. Dust them with a little pepper and salt. This salad should be served as soon as possible after being made.
A three-ingredient dressing over sliced fruit, and the whole thing lives or dies on timing. The only real work is deciding whether to keep the Victorian vinaigrette proportions.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessert-spoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly 2 teaspoons or 10 ml. So the dressing is about 2 teaspoons oil to 2 teaspoons vinegar with a teaspoon of sugar stirred in.
- The dressing ratioEqual oil and vinegar is far sharper than the modern 3:1 vinaigrette, which is why the sugar is there to balance it. If you use a strong malt or cider vinegar the result will be aggressive; a mild white wine vinegar suits bananas better, or shift toward two parts oil to one part vinegar.
- Serve at once, and mean itThis is the hinge of the recipe. Cut bananas brown within minutes as their phenolic compounds oxidise, and they also soften into mush. Slice directly into the dish, dress, and carry it to the table. The acid in the vinegar slows browning slightly but does not stop it.
- Ripeness"Quite ripe" means well freckled with brown but still firm enough to hold a slice. Underripe bananas are starchy and chalky against a sour dressing; overripe ones collapse when you turn them in it.
- The oilVictorian salad oil generally meant olive oil. A grassy, peppery modern extra-virgin will dominate the fruit; choose something gentle, or a neutral oil.
- Pepper and saltNot a misprint. This is intended as a savoury salad course, not a dessert, and the seasoning is what keeps it on that side of the line. Use it sparingly and grind the pepper fresh.
- YieldThree bananas will give roughly four small side portions. Scale the dressing by the same factor. Note that the recipe's insistence on serving at once applies to the dressed salad, not to the dressing.
Bananas were still something of an event in British kitchens when Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s. Regular shipments to Britain only became commercially viable once steamships shortened the Atlantic and Caribbean runs and refrigerated holds followed, a development usually placed around the turn of the century, and the fruit went in a couple of decades from a costly curiosity to something a middle-class household might buy. Recipes like this one show cooks working out what to do with an unfamiliar ingredient by fitting it into a shape they already knew: the plain oil-and-vinegar salad of the period, seasoned savoury and served as a course rather than a sweet. The instinct to treat bananas as a vegetable is less odd than it looks now, and survives in the plantain cookery of West Africa and the Caribbean, where the fruit was long established before it reached a British table.