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Baked Bananas
Remove skins from 7 bananas and cut in halves lengthwise. Put in shallow granite pan or on an old platter. Mix 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1/3 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons lemon juice. Baste bananas with 1/2 the mixture. Bake 20 minutes in slow oven, basting during baking with remaining mixture.
A four-ingredient side or dessert that depends almost entirely on the ripeness of the fruit and the restraint of the oven. Two clarifications carry most of the weight: what "slow oven" means, and what a "granite pan" is.
- Slow ovenIn this period the term generally meant somewhere around 300-325F; set the oven low, around 300F. The low heat lets the sugar syrup thicken and glaze over twenty minutes instead of scorching.
- Granite panGraniteware is enamelled steel, speckled grey, standard kitchen equipment when this was written. Any shallow ceramic, glass or enamelled baking dish does the same job. The alternative of an "old platter" suggests the sugar was expected to caramelise onto the surface.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, then a novelty. Two tablespoons of any melted neutral fat works, and melted butter is better here, since it browns and adds flavour the shortening cannot.
- Choose the bananas carefullyUse fruit that is fully yellow and just beginning to freckle. Green-tipped bananas stay starchy and chalky through baking; heavily blackened ones collapse into puree in a shallow pan.
- BastingHalf the syrup goes on before baking, half during, as the recipe directs. Baste once or twice over the twenty minutes, spooning from the pan floor where the mixture pools, or the exposed cut faces dry out.
- Sugar and lemonA third of a cup of sugar to seven bananas is a light hand. The lemon juice does more than flavour: the acid helps keep the cut faces from browning before the glaze sets.
- Yield and servingFourteen halves, enough for six to seven people. Baked bananas of this kind were often sent to table hot beside ham, pork or roast chicken rather than as a sweet course, though they take cream perfectly well.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911; the recipes in it are built around the product, which is why a dish of fruit and sugar calls for melted shortening rather than the butter a cook would reach for first. Bananas themselves were still slightly novel as an everyday item at that date, cheap and abundant in northern cities only after refrigerated steamers and the United Fruit trade made year-round imports routine in the two decades either side of 1900. Cookbooks of the period tended to treat them with suspicion raw, on the widespread belief that uncooked banana was hard to digest, and baking, frying or stewing them was the usual advice. That is the context for a recipe like this one: an inexpensive tropical fruit, cooked rather than served plain, sweetened lightly and sent to table beside the meat.