Skin fine bananas and lay them whole in a baking-dish. Sprinkle with sugar and grated lemon peel. Add the juice of 1 orange, ½ lemon and ½ glass of sherry wine. Let bake in a quick oven. Put the bananas in a glass dish and pour over the sauce. Let get cold and serve.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know what a baking-dish full of fruit looks like when it is done. The quantities of sugar and wine are left to the cook, and the oven is described only by feel.
- Quick ovenPeriod usage puts this somewhere around 400–450F. For whole bananas in a shallow dish, 425F for 15–20 minutes should be enough — the fruit soft and slightly collapsed, the syrup bubbling and glossy at the edges.
- Half a glass of sherryGenuinely ambiguous. A 'wineglassful' in period cookery books is usually reckoned at 2 fl oz, though a drinking glass of sherry would hold more; half is therefore about 1 fl oz, or 2 tablespoons. Start there; more and the sauce stays thin and boozy rather than reducing to syrup.
- Sugar, unmeasuredAbout 2 tablespoons for four bananas. Bananas ripe enough to bake are already sweet, and the point of the sugar here is to draw juice and give the wine and citrus something to thicken with.
- Fine bananasRipe but still firm, with no green at the tip and no brown flesh. Overripe fruit disintegrates into a puddle in twenty minutes of high heat, which defeats the instruction to lay them in whole.
- Grated lemon peelZest only — take it off in fine shreds and stop at the white pith, which turns bitter under sugar and heat.
- Baste once or twiceThere is very little liquid to begin with, and the exposed tops of the bananas will dry and leather over. Spoon the pan juices over them halfway through.
- The glass dishPouring hot syrup into thin decorative glass can crack it. Use tempered glass or let the sauce lose its steam first; the dish is meant to be served cold anyway.
- YieldOne banana per person, four in a standard 9-inch dish. It wants an hour or more in the refrigerator before serving, at which point the sauce will have thickened noticeably.
Baked bananas belong to the period when the fruit was shifting from curiosity to everyday import, as steam shipping brought Central American and West Indian fruit into European ports in growing quantity around the turn of the century. The treatment here — sugar, citrus and a splash of fortified wine — is much the same dressing given to baked pears or apples. Books like this one, which set out a dish a day and tag each with a nationality, were selling the idea that a home cook could travel through the year from her own kitchen, and the national labels are often looser than they look.