Apartment dining room, Cornell University Libraries
Last week's odd recipe for chicken and bananas, reminded me of a book I have. (I'm a librarian, I have a book about almost everything!) The book is part social history and part cookbook--and for every era there is a "worst recipe" feature. Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads by Sylvia Lovegren is just the sort of social history I love--well researched, detailed, and light hearted.
In the 1920s, it was salad that was all the rage. This is largely due to advances in refrigeration and transportation that allowed lettuces and other produce to be shipped by rail and truck from California throughout the U.S. Electricity had reached enough urban homes that refrigerators began to replace ice boxes, especially for restaurants and other commercial kitchens. Iceberg lettuce is developed at the same time--a lettuce with such tightly compressed leaves that it could be shipped long distances without much damage. Finally, the movies and its stars begin to popularize certain restaurants and their menus (like Waldorf salad).
As when anything is new, there weren't really any rules about salad making and many chefs tried outlandish combinations or designs. Lovegren notes one salad that was very popular in ladies' magazines: a salad of a banana, cut in half, and balanced on the flat end inside a pineapple ring, and topped with a piece of pimento and a dab of mayo. This was supposed to look like a candlestick. Lovegren notes that the gentlemen in the dinner party must have seen a different visual, but were still too confined by proper behavior to comment.
And yet, this is not the worst salad of the decade! Oh no, Lovegren assigns that title to Banana and Popcorn Salad:
1 banana, peeled and cut in half lengthwise
Lettuce leaf
Popcorn
Mayonaisse
Place the banana on the lettuce leaf. Scatter popcorn over the banana and put dabs of mayonnaise here and there. Makes 1 serving.
Now, I've had popcorn mixed with a wide variety of spices and I love popcorn and chocolate (sweet and salty, you know), but not with bananas and certainly never with mayo. So, I'll have to agree--banana and popcorn salad may well be the worst salad ever. Do you agree, or do you have a better candidate?
