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Banana Salad
3 Cut bananas in half crosswise, roll in white of egg, then in finely chopped walnuts. Serve with following dressing: cup milk, 1 tablespoon sugar, 2 small tablespoons Five Roses flour,½ cup vinegar. After it is cooked, add a small lump of butter, ½ teaspoon salt and 8 walnuts rolled fine.
The dressing here is a cooked boiled-dressing of the kind common in early twentieth-century salad cookery, but the salad itself depends on raw egg white as glue for the nuts, and that is where it fails.
- The raw egg whiteThe bananas are rolled in uncooked white and served without any heat step, so the coating goes to the table raw. Salmonella can be present in and on shell eggs, and nothing in this method brings the white anywhere near a temperature that would deal with it. This is the reason the recipe should not be made as written.
- Who it was served toFruit-and-nut salads of this kind appeared in the luncheon course of period cookbooks, though nothing here tells us who this one was aimed at. If you want a banana-and-walnut salad, use a current recipe with a cooked or pasteurised binder.
- The missing quantity"cup milk" appears to be missing its fraction. Boiled dressings of the period commonly run somewhere between half a cup and a cup of milk against half a cup of vinegar; the original as printed is genuinely ambiguous and cannot be resolved from the text.
- "2 small tablespoons"Most likely a scant or level spoonful rather than a separate unit, so roughly two level tablespoons of flour to thicken the dressing.
- The dressing itselfMilk, flour, sugar and vinegar cooked together is a boiled dressing, the standard household alternative to mayonnaise before commercial jars were common. The butter, salt and ground walnuts go in after the cooking, though the recipe does not say whether off the heat.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, which explains why a banana salad carries a flour-thickened dressing. Bananas reached Canadian and American groceries in quantity in the decades either side of 1900, and cookbooks of the period pushed them hard into the salad course, where fruit, nuts and a sweet-sour boiled dressing counted as a modern, refined luncheon dish. Boiled dressing itself is older than commercial mayonnaise in the North American home kitchen: cheap, shelf-stable in a cold pantry for a day or two, and built entirely from staples the flour company was happy to see you buying.