Banana Dainty
Cut the bananas in half crosswise and arrange them on a plate, radiating from the center. Sprinkle with grated nuts or nutmeg and heap white Mayonnaise in the center. Garnish with maraschino cherries
A fruit salad of the mayonnaise-on-fruit school that ran from about 1900 to the 1940s. Almost nothing here needs converting, but two of the terms mean something other than what they sound like.
- "White Mayonnaise"Not bottled mayonnaise. In books of this period the term generally signals a pale dressing: made with yolk only, a bland oil and lemon rather than vinegar, or lightened by folding stiffly whipped cream into finished mayonnaise. Whipped cream lightly sweetened and sharpened with a squeeze of lemon gives a similar effect on fruit.
- Assemble at the last minuteThis is the hinge of the dish. Cut bananas brown within minutes, and no dressing hides it. Peel, cut and plate immediately before serving, or brush the cut faces with lemon or orange juice.
- "Grated nuts"Grated, not chopped: walnuts, pecans or blanched almonds worked over a fine rasp so they fall as a powder that clings. Chopped nuts slide off the banana and collect on the plate.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the plate. Pre-ground nutmeg was available at the time and is flat by comparison; a few strokes of whole nutmeg is all the dish will carry.
- Maraschino cherriesOriginally a cherry preserved in maraschino liqueur, though by the early twentieth century American versions were increasingly brined, bleached and dyed, as the modern jarred sort is. The modern kind works visually; drain them well or the syrup bleeds pink into the dressing.
- Bananas to useRipe but firm, no black flecking on the skin. Overripe fruit collapses under the dressing and cannot be arranged.
- Yield and serviceReckon one banana per person as a salad course, served on a chilled plate, often on a lettuce leaf in the style of the period. It will not hold, so make only what goes to the table.
Fruit salads dressed with mayonnaise or a mayonnaise-and-cream mixture were a fixture of American entertaining in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Mrs. Fryer's Loose Leaf Cook Book files this one among the salads rather than the desserts. Salads of the period were often grouped by their dressing as much as by their ingredients, so anything from cabbage to pineapple could qualify once it had been mayonnaised. Bananas themselves were still a relatively new everyday luxury: steam shipping and improved rail transport had taken them from an exhibition novelty in the 1870s to a cheap staple by the time this book appeared, and cookbooks of the era hurried to find genteel uses for them. The word "dainty" in the title suggests a small, pretty, ladies'-luncheon dish, of the kind arranged for the eye.