Banana Salad
Yolk of one egg, one saltspoonful of salt, one-half teaspoonful of powdered sugar, one-half pint of oil, two tablespoonful of lemon juice, one gill of cream, six bananas, lettuce.
Stir the egg, salt and sugar in a shallow dish, add the oil slowly, and enough of the lemon juice to thin it. Just before serving add the cream, which has been whipped. Arrange nests of lettuce leaves on a salad dish. Slice the bananas, lay several pieces in each nest and cover with the dressing.
The salad itself is three ingredients; the dressing is a raw-yolk mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream, and that is where the problem lies.
- Why the dressing fails todayA single raw egg yolk is emulsified with oil and then served without any cooking step at all. Shell eggs are a recognised vehicle for Salmonella Enteritidis, and nothing in this method — no heat, no holding period in strong acid — reduces that risk. A current mayonnaise recipe, or a commercial pasteurised dressing, should be used instead.
- The acid is diluted, not increasedCommercial mayonnaise relies on a controlled level of acetic or citric acid to suppress bacterial growth. Here the lemon juice is added only "enough to thin it," and then a gill of whipped cream is folded in, which raises the pH further. The finished dressing is a low-acid, high-protein emulsion sitting at room temperature on a salad plate.
- GillOne gill is half a cup, so the cream measure is 4 fl oz before whipping — a substantial addition to the volume of dressing.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is the smallest of the old graduated spoons, roughly a quarter teaspoon.
- Half a pint of oilThat is one cup to a single yolk, a generous ratio though not an impossible one. Modern recipes more often work at around three-quarters of a cup of oil per yolk, which leaves more margin against the emulsion breaking.
- BananasSix bananas sliced will brown within minutes of cutting, and the recipe gives no instruction for holding them; the dressing goes over the slices at once.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but six bananas and this quantity of dressing suggest something on the order of six lettuce-cup servings, i.e. a luncheon salad course rather than a garnish.
Banana salads belong to a specific moment in American eating: once bananas had become cheap and reliably available in northern cities, cookbook writers were casting about for things to do with them beyond eating them out of hand. The answer, over and over, was the salad plate — sliced fruit in a lettuce nest under boiled or mayonnaise dressing, a formula that also carried pineapple, pear and grapefruit through the same decades. The cream folded into mayonnaise here is what period books often called a "cream mayonnaise" or, when made with whipped cream, a Mayonnaise Chantilly; it was considered the polite dressing for fruit, since plain mayonnaise was thought too sharp. Salad itself had shifted within a generation from a side dish of dressed greens to a course with its own literature.- Anaconda News Journal Nov 8 1963: