Banana Sauce
1 cup water. 1/2 cup sugar.
Pulp 3 bananas. 3 tablespoons lemon juice. 2 eggs well beaten.
Few grains salt.
Few gratings lemon rind.
PROCESS: Make a syrup by boiling water and sugar ten minutes. Rub bananas through a sieve, add remaining ingredients and beat until well blended and light. Pour on hot syrup slowly, beating constantly. Serve hot. Pulp of peaches or apricots may be used in place of bananas.
A foamy dessert sauce of the kind meant for steamed puddings, and typical of its date in relying on hot syrup alone to cook the eggs. That is the part that does not survive scrutiny.
- The eggs never reach a safe temperatureTwo whole eggs are beaten raw into cold banana pulp and lemon juice, and the only heat in the recipe is the syrup poured in afterward. Boiling syrup is hot, but it is diluted by a larger quantity of cold pulp and egg, and there is no way to know what temperature the finished sauce reaches; it is served immediately rather than cooked further, so the eggs cannot be assumed to be pasteurized.
- Why "serve hot" does not fix itHot to the hand is not hot enough. Salmonella risk in shell eggs is addressed by holding the mixture at temperature, not by a brief contact with something hot, and this method has no step that does that. Use a current recipe for a foamy or sabayon-type sauce, one that cooks the egg mixture over water to a stated temperature.
- Boiling ten minutesTen minutes at a boil drives off a good deal of the water, so the syrup is thicker and the yield smaller than the starting cup and a half suggests.
- "Few grains" and "few gratings"A pinch of salt, and a little grated lemon zest. Both are seasoning quantities left to the cook's judgment, not measurements that have been lost.
- Rubbing bananas through a sieveA sieve was the only way to get a smooth pur he also holds back the coarser fibre.
- Yield and intended useEnough light sauce for a family-sized pudding. Sauces like this were poured over a steamed or boiled pudding at the table rather than eaten alone.
- The peach and apricot variationThe substitution note tells you the sauce was built around any soft, acidic fruit pulp. It carries the same problem: the fruit changes nothing about the eggs.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the American menu-planning literature of the early 1910s, when a cookbook's selling point was a full year of Sunday meals worked out in advance, sauce and all. That bananas turn up at all is the interesting detail: a generation earlier they had been a costly novelty in northern cities, and by the time this book was printed the refrigerated steamship trade out of Central America had made them one of the few fresh fruits an inland household could count on in midwinter. The technique is older than the fruit. Pouring boiling syrup onto beaten egg to make a warm foam is the same principle as a sabayon or the "frothy" pudding sauces that fill nineteenth-century English and American books, and it was valued because it stretched two eggs and half a cup of sugar into enough sauce for a family without cream or butter. Trusting the syrup alone to cook the egg is the one thing about the recipe that has not aged.