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Banana Salad
Bananas may be sliced, diced or crushed, to be served with fine-sliced orange, or diced apple and nuts, on the tenderest lettuce. Pineapple or cherries may be added. Use the cream or liqueur-flavoured dressings given in Introductory Recipes.
This is a formula rather than a recipe, typical of early twentieth-century fruit books: it gives combinations and leaves the proportions to the cook. A few decisions have to be made before you can put it on a plate.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four servings, figure two bananas, one orange or one apple, and about a quarter cup of nuts, with dressing added by the spoonful until the fruit is just coated.
- BrowningSliced bananas and diced apple discolour within minutes. Toss both in citrus juice as you cut, and assemble the salad immediately before it goes to the table rather than holding it in the refrigerator.
- "The tenderest lettuce"Probably a soft butterhead or Boston type, used as a cup or leaf bed under the fruit rather than shredded through it; the book does not specify. Stiffer leaves such as romaine or iceberg suit this treatment less well.
- The dressings referred toThese are given elsewhere in the book, in Introductory Recipes, and are not reproduced here. A period "cream dressing" is typically a boiled or cooked dressing thinned with cream, or whipped cream folded into a little mayonnaise; "liqueur-flavoured" typically means a spoonful of maraschino, curaçao or kirsch stirred into either.
- PineappleIf you use fresh pineapple with a cream or mayonnaise-based dressing, dress at the last moment. Bromelain in raw pineapple attacks milk and egg proteins and can loosen the dressing and give it an off, faintly bitter taste on standing; canned pineapple has been heated, which deactivates the enzyme.
- CherriesIn books of this kind the word often meant candied or maraschino cherries, used as colour. Fresh sweet cherries work, pitted and halved, but they release juice and will tint the dressing pink.
- NutsWalnuts or pecans, coarsely broken rather than chopped fine, and toasted briefly if you want them to stay crisp against the wet fruit.
Fruit salad on a lettuce leaf, bound with a sweetened cream or mayonnaise dressing, was a fixture of the American and British luncheon table from the 1890s through the 1930s, and books of fruit cookery like this one exist largely because the banana had just become an everyday item. Ventilated steamships and the shipping and rail networks built up by the Boston Fruit Company, founded in the mid-1880s, and its successor the United Fruit Company, formed in 1899, brought Central American bananas into ordinary northern markets, turning a rarity into something cheap enough to slice into a salad; mechanical refrigeration came to the trade around the turn of the century. The instruction to serve fruit on lettuce with a rich dressing, rather than as dessert, marks the period's enthusiasm for the "salad course" as a genteel middle of the meal.