Fried Bananas
Peel and slice lengthwise, fry in butter, sprinkle with sugar, and serve. Thus prepared they make a nice dessert. The bananas must be ripe.
A four-line recipe that works exactly as written, provided the fruit is right and the pan is not too hot.
- Ripeness is the hingeThe original insists on ripe fruit for good reason: underripe bananas are starchy and astringent and will not caramelize. Use fruit that is fully yellow with brown flecks, still firm enough to hold a slice.
- Cutting lengthwiseHalve each banana the long way, and quarter longer ones if they are thick. Flat faces give the maximum surface in contact with the butter, which is the whole point of the method.
- Butter and heatMedium heat, about 2 tablespoons of butter for four bananas. Butter browns fast and turns bitter over high heat; if it starts to smoke, pull the pan. A knob of clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, buys more margin.
- TimingTwo to three minutes a side, until the cut faces are deep gold. Turn once with a thin spatula; the fruit softens as it cooks and will break up if fussed with.
- The sugarSprinkling sugar after frying, as written, leaves a light crunch. Sprinkling it on the cut faces before they hit the pan gives a proper caramel crust instead. Either is faithful to the intent; the second needs closer watching.
- YieldOne banana per person as a dessert course, two if it is the whole of the sweet. Serve immediately -- fried bananas collapse and weep within a few minutes of leaving the pan.
- Worth addingA squeeze of lemon or lime cuts the sweetness, and cream, whipped or plain, suits the dish, though the recipe calls for none. Rum poured over the pan at the end is a later addition, not part of this recipe.
Buckeye Cookery belongs to the Ohio and Minnesota compilations of the later 1870s and 1880s, a period when bananas were beginning to reach American markets in quantity rather than as a curiosity. Steam shipping and the expanding rail network carried fruit north from the Caribbean -- Jamaica and Cuba above all in these decades -- through Gulf and Atlantic ports, though supply in the interior remained seasonal, costly and uneven, and reliable year-round stocking by small-town grocers came later. The fruit's appearance in a domestic manual of this kind, with a note that it must be ripe, suggests readers were still learning how to handle it. Frying in butter with sugar is the simplest treatment available; the more elaborate baked, flambeed and rum-laced versions that later attached themselves to the banana in American cooking belong to the twentieth century.