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BANANAS, FRIED (American recipe)
Choose six large firm bananas. Peel, and cut into slices lengthways. Fry in a little butter or with bacon until they begin to brown. Serve with the bacon or alone, as preferred. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A three-line recipe that works exactly as written; the only real variables are ripeness and heat.
- Choose firm, not green"Firm" here means just-yellow with no more than a fleck of brown. Fully ripe fruit collapses into puree in the pan, while genuinely green bananas stay starchy and chalky.
- Slicing lengthways"Slices lengthways" may mean halves or several thinner planks per fruit; cut the pieces crosswise as well if they are unwieldy. Thicker planks hold together better in the pan than thin ones.
- Heat and fatMedium heat in a wide pan, enough butter to film the base. Butter browns fast alongside the sugars in the fruit, so watch it rather than timing it; two to three minutes a side is usual.
- Frying with baconThe bacon fat is the point of that variation. Cook the bacon first, lift it out, and fry the bananas in the rendered fat, which is saltier and less prone to burning than butter alone.
- Turning onceMove the slices as little as possible. They are fragile once heated through, and a fish slice or palette knife is more use than tongs.
- Cost noteThe "1s. 3d." is pre-decimal British currency, one shilling and threepence, and reflects imported fruit prices of the period rather than anything useful today.
- YieldSix bananas serve four to six as a side dish with bacon, or three to four as a sweet course. A dusting of sugar and a squeeze of lemon suits the latter.
Cassell's flags this as an American recipe, which suggests where fried bananas were familiar in the nineteenth century and where they were not. Bananas reached British and North American markets in quantity only after steamship routes from the Caribbean and Central America shortened the voyage, and in United States port cities they became cheap enough to be cooked rather than merely eaten out of hand. Frying them in bacon fat and serving them alongside the bacon fits the Southern and Caribbean habit of treating the banana and its starchier relative the plantain as a vegetable, a savoury accompaniment to salt pork. British cookery books of the period more often filed the banana under dessert, so its appearance here beside a rasher is the sort of borrowing the dictionary format was built to record.