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Banana and Nut Salad
3 bananas
½ cup mayonnaise or boiled
½ cup nuts dressing
6 leaves lettuce
Peel bananas and cut in two lengthwise. Roll in nut-meats. Place on lettuce leaf and garnish with dressing. Equal parts of dressing and whipped cream may be used.
A one-minute assembly salad of the type that filled American cookbooks between about 1900 and 1930. The printed ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column setting: it reads 3 bananas, ½ cup nuts, 6 lettuce leaves, and ½ cup mayonnaise or boiled dressing.
- Boiled dressingA cooked dressing of egg yolk, vinegar, mustard, a little sugar and flour or cornstarch, thickened over water rather than emulsified with oil. It is sharper and thinner than mayonnaise, and it was the cheaper option in a household without a steady supply of salad oil.
- The nuts"Roll in nut-meats" means chopped nuts, not halves — chop them fine enough to stick. Walnuts or pecans are the usual choice; toasting them briefly improves a salad that otherwise has no cooked element in it.
- Making them adhereBare banana is not tacky enough to hold a coating well. Brushing the cut faces with a little of the dressing, or with lemon juice, before rolling gives a far better crust.
- BrowningCut bananas discolour within minutes. A squeeze of lemon or orange juice over the cut side slows it, and the salad should be assembled immediately before it goes to the table.
- Whipped cream variantLightening the dressing with an equal part of whipped cream was a common treatment for fruit salads of this era; it makes the dressing milder and richer rather than sharper. Use unsweetened cream, folded in at the last moment, or it will weep.
- YieldSix halves on six lettuce leaves: six small side salads, or three as a light lunch course.
Fruit-and-nut salads on a lettuce leaf were a fixture of American entertaining once bananas became cheap and reliably available he Fruit trade had made them a year-round grocery item by the early twentieth century, rather than the luxury they had been a generation earlier. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a readership of home dressmakers and housekeepers, favours exactly this kind of dish: no cooking, a few pantry ingredients, and a presentation that looks composed on the plate. The pairing of sweet fruit with mayonnaise strikes most modern palates as odd, but boiled dressing was tart and eggy rather than oily, and it may well have worked as a foil to the fruit in the same way a vinaigrette is to greens.