Banana Salad
Peel the bananas and scrape them carefully to remove all stringy matter. Roll each in grated nuts and lay on a lettuce leaf. Serve with Mayonnaise dressing.
A whole-banana salad of the sort that filled the fruit-salad pages of American cookbooks between about 1900 and 1930. It is barely a recipe, so the few decisions it leaves open are the ones that matter.
- The stringy matterThe phloem bundles that cling to a peeled banana are what Mrs. Fryer wants scraped away. Draw the back of a paring knife down the fruit lengthwise; a dull edge lifts the strings without gouging the flesh.
- RipenessUse bananas that are yellow with no more than a fleck of brown. Anything softer will not survive rolling in nuts or hold its shape on the plate.
- Grated nuts"Grated" here likely means finer than chopped, closer to a coarse meal. The recipe does not say which nut; English walnuts or pecans would both suit. Grate or pulse them just before using, since nut meal goes stale and oily fast.
- BrowningThe recipe says nothing about it, presumably because the salad was meant to be assembled and served at once. A brush of lemon juice before the nuts is the standard fix if you need to hold the plates even ten minutes.
- The dressingPeriod mayonnaise for fruit salads was often thinned with lemon juice or cream and sometimes sweetened slightly, which suits banana far better than a straight savory mayonnaise. Spoon it beside the fruit rather than over it, or the nut coating slides off.
- Yield and servingOne banana per person, laid whole on a single crisp lettuce leaf, as an individual salad course. Bibb or the heart leaves of iceberg give the cupped shape the arrangement assumes.
Banana salads belong to a specific American moment: by the 1900s refrigerated steamships and the United Fruit Company had made bananas cheap and reliable in northern cities, and cookbooks scrambled to find things to do with a fruit that had recently been an expensive novelty. The result was a genre of fruit-and-mayonnaise salads that reads oddly now but is often said to have made sense in a period when the salad course was understood as a light, sweet-leaning interlude rather than a savory one, and when commercial mayonnaise is generally thought to have been new enough still to feel modern. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format — whatever its intended use — belongs to the same moment, one in which a whole banana rolled in walnuts could be presented as a proper course.