Banana Pie
Slice raw bananas, add butter, sugar, allspice and vinegar, or boiled cider, or diluted jelly; bake with two crusts. Cold boiled sweet potatoes may be used instead of bananas, and are very nice.
A mock-apple pie in everything but the fruit: bananas stand in for apples, and the vinegar or boiled cider supplies the tartness they lack. The original gives no quantities and no oven setting, so the proportions below are working figures, not conversions.
- The hinge: acidBananas have almost no acidity, and without it the filling tastes flat and cloying. The vinegar, boiled cider or diluted jelly is doing the job apples would normally do, and it is not optional. About 1 tablespoon cider vinegar, or 2 tablespoons boiled cider, for 4-5 sliced bananas.
- Working quantitiesFor a 9-inch double-crust pie: 4-5 firm bananas sliced about 1/4 inch thick, 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar, 1 to 2 tablespoons butter dotted over, 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice, plus the acid. A tablespoon of flour or cornstarch tossed with the sugar will keep the juices from running, since bananas give up more liquid in the oven than the original allows for.
- RipenessUse bananas that are yellow and barely speckled. Very ripe fruit collapses into a paste under a lid of pastry; underripe fruit stays starchy and chalky.
- OvenThe recipe names none. Bake at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F for 30-35 minutes until the top browns and juices bubble at the vents. Cut steam vents; this filling steams heavily.
- Boiled ciderFresh cider boiled down until thick and dark; traditional practice reduced it to something like a seventh of its original volume. It was a common pantry item in the 1870s and is sold again by New England producers. Cider vinegar cut with a little water is the nearest everyday substitute; plain apple juice is not, being too sweet and too dilute to supply the sharpness.
- "Diluted jelly"Any tart jelly loosened with a spoonful of water to a pourable state. Currant, crabapple or quince all suit the spice; grape works but dominates.
- The sweet potato versionCold boiled sweet potato sliced into the same butter, sugar, allspice and acid makes a firmer, less watery pie and is the more reliable of the two. Slice about 1/4 inch thick and use the full amount of acid, since sweet potato is even less tart than banana.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Best served the day it is baked; the crust softens badly overnight under a banana filling.
Bananas reached American markets in quantity only in the 1870s and 1880s, as fast steam shipping and ventilated rail cars made Caribbean fruit something other than a curiosity at a fair. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Minneapolis and Marysville, Ohio, and reissued through those decades, catches the fruit at the moment it became familiar enough to bake but still novel enough to want an established treatment ut:: sliced raw, sugared, spiced with allspice, sharpened with vinegar or boiled cider, and shut between two crusts. The vinegar tells the real story. Nineteenth-century American pie was built on tart fruit, and the recipe suggests cooks meeting a sweet, bland newcomer reached for the acid jug — the same instinct one might read behind the era's vinegar pies and mock-apple pies made from crackers. The offhand note that cold boiled sweet potatoes "may be used instead" is characteristic of the book's economy: a formula was worth printing partly for what else it would accommodate.