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Baked Bananas with Sultana Sauce
6 bananas. 3/4 cup Sultana raisins. 2¾ cups boiling water. 1 cup sugar. 1 tablespoon butter.
Few grains salt. 1/4 cup Sherry wine. 2 tablespoons lemon juice. 1 tablespoon cornstarch or two teaspoons Arrowroot. 3 tablespoons Cottolene. 1/2 cup N. O. Molasses. 1/2 cup milk. 1 egg well beaten. 1½ cups Graham flour. 1/2 teaspoon soda. 1 teaspoon salt. 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. 1/4 teaspoon cloves. 1/2 teaspoon mace. 1 cup dates stoned and cut in pieces.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add molasses, milk and egg. Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add dates and stir into first mixture, beat thoroughly. Turn into a buttered tube mold, cover and steam two and one-half hours. Serve with Sherry Sauce (recipe Page 130). PROCESS: With a sharp knife open and peel down one section of each banana, carefully loosen the pulp from the rest of the skin; remove pulp and scrape lightly with a silver knife, removing all the coarse threads. Replace the pulp in its original shape in the skins. Arrange the bananas in an agate dripping pan and bake in a moderate oven until the skins are black and the pulp is soft (from ten to fifteen minutes). Remove pulp from skins to serving platter, being careful to preserve their shape. Curve them slightly and pour over
Two recipes have run together on this page: a steamed date pudding (the Cottolene-molasses-Graham flour list and its process) and the baked bananas with sultana sauce that gives the page its title. Sort the ingredients into the two dishes before you start.
- Which ingredients belong whereThe bananas, sultanas, boiling water, sugar, butter, salt, sherry, lemon juice and cornstarch make the bananas and their sauce. The Cottolene, molasses, milk, egg, Graham flour, soda, salt, spices and dates are a separate steamed date pudding.
- The sauce method is missingThe page breaks off at "pour over." The ingredients suggest, though the page does not say so, boiling the raisins in the water until plump, adding the sugar, thickening with the cornstarch or arrowroot slaked in cold water, then finishing off the heat with butter, salt, sherry and lemon juice. Cook the starch through or the sauce tastes chalky.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, who commissioned this book. Any solid vegetable shortening or an equal weight of butter works in the pudding.
- N. O. molassesNew Orleans molasses: unsulphured cane molasses, mild and light. Not blackstrap, which is far more bitter and will fight the dates.
- Graham flour and sodaGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour; stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match. There is no baking powder here — the half teaspoon of soda works against the acidity of the molasses, so do not substitute a sweeter syrup.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375°F in modern terms; period usage of the phrase varied. Ten to fifteen minutes is right for bananas in their skins, which the recipe says are done when the skins are black and the pulp is soft.
- Agate dripping panEnamelled steel roasting pan. Any shallow metal pan will do. A silver knife was commonly specified for handling fruit, generally said to avoid the discolouring and metallic taste ordinary steel blades gave; a plastic or stainless scraper is fine now.
- Steaming the puddingTwo and a half hours in a covered, buttered tube mold set on a rack in a deep pot, water halfway up the sides, kept at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- YieldSix bananas serve six; the sauce quantity is generous and will keep several days refrigerated.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller, a Chicago cooking-school teacher, and published by the N. K. Fairbank Company to promote Cottolene, its cottonseed-oil shortening — which is why that one brand name appears in a list otherwise made of generic staples. Bananas had become cheap and reliably available in America only in the preceding two decades, with the growth of the refrigerated steamship trade, and cookbooks of the era still treated them as a fruit needing instruction, hence the careful business of peeling back one section of skin, scraping away the coarse threads, and baking the pulp in its own jacket. The sherry-and-raisin sauce recalls older English pudding sauces, here put to work on a tropical fruit.