Banana and Celery Salad

History

This recipe is printed as "Banana and Celery Salad" in the "Soups, Salads, Relishes" chapter of Martha McCulloch-Williams's Dishes & Beverages of the Old South, published in New York by McBride, Nast & Company in 1913. The book's full instruction reads: "Chill heart celery and very ripe bananas, slice thin crosswise, mingling the rounds well. Pile on lettuce leaves, and cover with French dressing, into which finely grated cheese has been scantly stirred". The author adds that this cheese-enriched dressing "is fine for tender Romaine, also for almost any sort of cooked vegetable used as salad". In the book it sits among other fruit-and-vegetable salads — a shredded-pineapple "Fruit Salad," a grapefruit-and-beet "Red and White Salad," and a rum-steeped "Pineapple Salad".

Beyond its appearance in this cookbook, the historical record documents nothing specific about this dish: no named originator, no dated first appearance elsewhere, and no account of how it spread. Dressing a salad of celery with fruit was already established in American cookery — Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf salad, made of apples, celery, and mayonnaise, dates to 1893 — so McCulloch-Williams's celery-and-banana pairing fits a familiar early-twentieth-century salad idiom. But no source I found ties this particular recipe to that lineage, and the book itself offers no framing of the salad as a marker of refinement, status, or class.

Ingredients

• heart celery
• bananas
• lettuce leaves
• French dressing
• scant finely grated cheese

Instructions

1. Chill the heart celery and very ripe bananas. Slice them thin crosswise and mingle the rounds together well. Pile onto lettuce leaves. Cover with French dressing into which finely grated cheese has been scantly stirred.