Banana Salad
Remove one section of skin from each of four bananas. Take out fruit, scrape, and cut fruit from one banana in thin slices, fruit from other three bananas in one-half inch cubes. Marinate cubes with French Dressing. Refill skins and garnish each with slices of banana. Stack around a mound of lettuce leaves.
A composed salad from the era when fruit dressed with oil and vinegar was fashionable rather than odd. It is assembly work, and the whole thing hinges on timing.
- Work fast, or the bananas brownCut and dress within a few minutes of serving. Enzymatic browning starts almost immediately on cut banana; the acid in the dressing slows it but does not stop it.
- "Scrape" the fruitThis means removing the stringy phloem bundles that cling to the peeled banana. A paring knife edge or a fingernail takes them off in seconds.
- Removing the skin sectionCut a single lengthwise strip out of the peel, leaving a boat with the two ends intact. Slightly underripe bananas hold their shape far better than spotted ones, both as shells and as cubes.
- French DressingIn this book that means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, sometimes paprika, beaten or shaken together, not a sweet orange-red bottled product. Period versions run around two parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice; lemon also helps against browning.
- Cubes from three, slices from oneThree bananas' worth of dressed cubes are divided among the four shells, with the fourth banana sliced into thin rounds for garnish.
- Yield and servingFour servings, one filled skin each. The lettuce mound in the centre is a platter arrangement, not a per-plate one.
Banana salad belongs to a particular moment in American cooking, around the turn of the twentieth century, when improved steamship transport had made the banana cheap and widely available in northern cities and cooks were still deciding what to do with it. The book treats fruit salads as a course rather than a dessert, and its salad section carries a number of these constructions: fruit cut up, dressed with vinaigrette or boiled dressing, and rebuilt into its own shell or served in a cup of lettuce. The serving-in-the-skin trick, common to this era's grapefruit, orange and banana salads, may have been partly economy of dishes and partly the same impulse that produced aspics and moulded creams: food should look composed. It also suggests something about how the banana was regarded then -- a novelty with a striking natural container, worth showing off, rather than the everyday item in the fruit bowl it became a generation later.