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Banana Salad
Slice bananas with a silver knife upon lettuce, and pour Sour Cream dressing over them.
Three lines of instruction, and most of the work is in the dressing the recipe assumes you already have. A few notes on what the original takes for granted.
- The silver knifeSilver was specified because carbon steel blades of the period reacted with the fruit and left grey streaks along the cut faces. Any stainless or ceramic blade does the same job now.
- Slice at the last minuteCut bananas brown within minutes of exposure to air. Assemble the plates immediately before they go to the table, or toss the slices in a little lemon juice first, which the book does not mention but which costs nothing.
- The sour cream dressingThe capitalisation implies a separate recipe given elsewhere in the book; such dressings were generally sour cream thinned with vinegar or lemon juice and seasoned with sugar and salt. Home-soured cream of the period was often thinner and sharper than modern commercial sour cream, so loosen the latter with a spoonful of milk or lemon juice to get something pourable.
- The lettuceA recipe of this period calling for lettuce most likely means a soft-leaf head lettuce rather than a crisphead. Butter or Boston lettuce, left in whole cup-shaped leaves as a bed for the fruit, is closest to the intent.
- YieldReckon one banana per person, sliced across in rounds about a quarter-inch thick, with two or three leaves under each portion. About two tablespoons of dressing per serving is enough; more and the fruit slides.
- Where it belongs on the menuThis is a sweet fruit salad served on greens, the kind of course that came between the roast and dessert in an Edwardian dinner. Treated as a modern side dish it will read as very sweet next to savory food.
Fruit salads bedded on lettuce and dressed with sweetened sour cream or boiled dressing were a fixture of American cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1930s, when the salad course was newly fashionable and understood as something light and decorative rather than green and vinegary. Bananas made the list because they had only recently become an everyday grocery item: refrigerated steamers and the growth of the Central American trade in the closing decades of the nineteenth century turned them from a costly novelty into a fruit a middle-class household could buy year-round. The instruction to use a silver knife is a genuine period technicality rather than a flourish. The Butterick Publishing Company was better known for dress patterns and The Delineator.