Banana Salad
Peel and cut six bananas into thin slices, then pour over them Fruit Salad Dressing, No. 2, stand in a cold place one hour, and serve.
A two-line recipe that depends entirely on a dressing printed elsewhere in the book, and on bananas behaving better than they actually do. Both are worth planning for.
- The missing dressing"Fruit Salad Dressing, No. 2" is a separate entry; without it this is just sliced fruit. Period fruit salad dressings of this kind were often built on lemon or orange juice with sugar, sometimes enriched with egg yolk or cream, though oil-based dressings were also used for fruit. If you cannot consult the original entry, a sweet-acid dressing is the likeliest fit.
- Browning is the hingeCut bananas oxidise within minutes and will be grey-brown well before the hour of chilling is up. Slice directly into the dressing and turn the slices so every cut face is coated in acid; that is the only reason the standing time is tolerable at all.
- Cut thicker than "thin"Slice thickness -- The recipe says thin, but thin slices soften noticeably over an hour in liquid. Rounds of about a quarter inch hold their shape better and still take up the dressing.
- RipenessUse bananas that are fully yellow with no green at the tip but no brown freckling either. Overripe fruit turns to paste in the dressing; underripe fruit tastes starchy and chalky against sugar and lemon.
- "A cold place"Written before household refrigeration was general, this means an icebox, cellar or cold larder. The refrigerator is the modern equivalent, and an hour is the maximum rather than a minimum here.
- Yield and servingSix bananas gives four to six small salad portions. Fruit salads of this period were often served chilled on a lettuce leaf on individual plates, though this recipe specifies nothing beyond "serve".
This comes from the era when American cookbooks were arguing that summer meals should be built around cold, uncooked food rather than the same heavy roasts and stews eaten in January. Bananas suit that argument, and they appear because they had recently become cheap and ordinary: regular steamship routes from Central America and the Caribbean turned the banana from a relative luxury in the 1870s into a fruit sold from city carts by the 1890s. "Salad" in this period covered a wider range than it does now, sweet dishes as well as savoury, which is why a dish of sliced fruit sits in the salad chapter without apology.