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Devilled Bananas
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful salt 8 bananas 1 teaspoonful chopped pickles Few grains red pepper, or 1 dessertspoonful chopped chillies Slice bananas, mix with salt, chopped pickles and red pepper or chopped chillies and put them into hot Crisco. Cook for four minutes and serve. Sufficient for eight bananas.
A short savoury fry-up that reads oddly under the heading "Cakes" — a compositor's slip, most likely, since nothing here is baked. It is a devilled relish or side dish, and it depends almost entirely on the ripeness of the fruit and the heat of the pan.
- Use firm, barely ripe bananasFully ripe fruit collapses into paste within a minute of hitting hot fat. Choose bananas that are still yellow-green at the tips and cut them into thick diagonal slices or lengthwise halves so they hold together.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched in 1911 and still sold. Any neutral fat with a decent smoke point does the same job; butter will brown and burn before the four minutes are up.
- DessertspoonfulAn old British measure sitting between the teaspoon and the tablespoon — roughly two teaspoons. So about two teaspoons of chopped chillies for eight bananas.
- "Few grains red pepper"Red pepper here means cayenne, and a few grains means a pinch — perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon. It is an alternative to the chillies, not an addition.
- Chopped picklesIn a 1910s American kitchen this probably means cucumber pickles, and the seasoning suggests something sharp rather than sweet, though the recipe does not specify. Drain them well or the moisture will steam the bananas instead of frying them.
- The four minutesThat is four minutes total in a hot pan, not a gentle simmer. Get the fat shimmering, lay the slices in a single layer, and turn once; crowding the pan is what turns this to mush.
- Mixing orderTossing sliced banana with salt and wet pickle before frying draws out juice. It works better to season the fat and scatter the pickle and chilli over the slices as they cook.
- Yield and servingThe recipe states its yield only as 'sufficient for eight bananas' and gives no number of diners; as an accompaniment eight bananas would stretch to several servings. Devilled bananas belong beside curry, grilled ham, cold tongue or roast fowl — they are a relish, not a dessert.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, which came on the market in 1911 as the first widely sold all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening; the recipes call for the product by name, which is why two tablespoonfuls of Crisco head a list that could as easily have said "fat." "Devilled" had by then been standard English culinary shorthand for a century or more for anything made hot with cayenne, mustard or pepper ot kbones, devilled ham. Bananas were still a relative novelty in American kitchens, cheap and abundant only since the growth of the Caribbean fruit trade in the 1880s and 1890s, and cookbooks of the period worked hard to place them somewhere other than dessert. Frying them with pickle and chilli reflects the era's fondness for Anglo-Indian curry accompaniments, where fried plantain served much the same purpose.