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Baked Plantains
Peel and put in a baking dish, either whole or cut in squares, then sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon, and add a large lump of butter. Put in the stove and bake, basting several times while cooking, to prevent being dry. -Mrs. P. F. Pescud.
A short late-Victorian recipe that assumes you know what a plantain looks like when it is ready. The single decision that matters is ripeness.
- Ripeness is the hingeUse plantains whose skins are largely black with yellow patches and yield to a squeeze. Green or half-yellow fruit stays starchy and chalky no matter how long it bakes, and no amount of sugar and butter will fix it.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this: 25 to 30 minutes for split or squared pieces, 40 to 45 for whole peeled fruit, until the edges are caramelised and a knife slides through without resistance.
- "Put in the stove""Stove" here means the kitchen range, and the baking dish went into its oven compartment. Nothing in the recipe is done on the hob.
- A large lump of butterRead it as 2 to 3 tablespoons for four plantains, cut up and dotted over the surface rather than dropped in one place, so it melts into a basting liquid quickly.
- Sugar and cinnamon quantitiesUnspecified in the original. Roughly 2 tablespoons sugar and half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon per four plantains works; ripe fruit is already sweet, so err low.
- Basting matters more than it soundsPlantains have little free moisture and the butter is the only liquid in the dish. Baste every ten minutes, or cover for the first half of the baking and uncover to brown. A splash of water, orange juice or rum in the dish will do the same job.
- Cut side downIf you halve them lengthways, start cut side down in the butter and turn once. The contact surface is where the sugar caramelises.
- Yield and servingFour plantains serve four as a sweet side or a simple dessert. It goes with roast pork or ham, or with cream.
At the turn of the twentieth century plantains were an import rather than a staple in most American kitchens: banana and plantain cargoes from the Caribbean and Central America were arriving in Gulf and East Coast ports in steadily growing volume through the 1880s and 1890s, and the fruit still carried novelty in inland households. Baked or fried ripe plantain with sugar and spice is a long-standing preparation across the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America, where it is generally known by names built on pl he uookbooks of this period tend to present it, as here, without any explanation of its origin. The attribution to Mrs. P. F. Pescud is typical of the community-compiled cookbook, where recipes travelled under the name of the woman who submitted them rather than the cuisine they came from.