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Banana Fritters
One-half pint of flour, yolks of three eggs beaten light, one teacup of milk and a small lump of butter about size of a walnut, a pinch of salt. Beat the whites until very stiff. Stir the batter well. Peel the bananas, cut in strips lengthwise; dip them in the batter and fry a very light brown. Sprinkle powdered sugar over the top and serve. These are nice eaten either hot or cold.
A plain fritter batter with the sweetness left to the fruit and the sugar on top. The recipe assumes you know what to do with the beaten whites, and it never tells you.
- Fold the whites in lastThe whites are beaten stiff and then not mentioned again — "stir the batter well" is where they belong, folded in gently once the yolks, milk, flour and butter are smooth. Stirred in hard, or added early and left standing, they collapse and you get a heavy coating instead of a puffed one.
- Half a pint of flourOne cup, about 4 1/2 oz. Nineteenth-century American books measure dry goods by liquid capacity as a matter of course.
- A teacup of milkA teacup is generally reckoned smaller than a modern cup, though period usage varied from about 4 fl oz up to a full cup — 3/4 cup is a reasonable working figure. Add it gradually; the batter should coat the back of a spoon and cling to the fruit, not run off it.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 to 2 tablespoons. Melt it before it goes in, or it will stay in lumps.
- Frying fat and temperatureNo fat or depth is specified. Deep fry at 350-365F in a neutral oil; below that the batter drinks fat, above it browns before the banana heats through. "A very light brown" is the correct target — these want two to three minutes, not longer.
- Choose firmer bananasFully ripe, spotted fruit turns to paste inside the crust and splits it. Bananas still faintly green at the tip hold their shape. Cut lengthwise as directed, or crosswise on the diagonal for shorter pieces that are easier to turn.
- Yield and servingThree or four bananas' worth, enough for four. Drain on paper before sugaring so the powdered sugar does not dissolve into a glaze. They are best within minutes of frying, whatever the original says about eating them cold.
Fritters were one of the busiest categories in a late-Victorian American kitchen — corn, oyster, apple, parsnip, clam — and the batter here is a standard all-purpose one. Classification in these books follows technique and household routine more often than botany or course order. Bananas themselves were a novelty turned commonplace within a single generation: steamship traffic from the Caribbean and Central America made them an increasingly cheap and widely available fruit in American cities by the 1880s and 1890s, and cookbooks of the period fold them into forms already familiar to their readers — fritters, custards, moulded creams — rather than treating them as anything exotic. The final line, that they are good hot or cold, is a reminder of how much of this cooking was expected to reappear at the next meal.