Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bananas, Fried
Bananas, Fried
Cut six bananas into halves lengthways, strew some castor sugar over, dip in a rich batter, and fry in very hot butter for four or five minute. Dish up and strew a little cochineal sugar over. Probable cost, 1s.
A late-Victorian fritter, brief to the point of terseness. Two things need translating: the sugars, and the fat.
- Castor sugarCaster (superfine) sugar, finer than granulated but not powdered. Ordinary granulated works, though it dissolves less readily on the cut fruit.
- Cochineal sugarCaster sugar tinted pink with cochineal, the carmine dye from the dried insect. A pinch of red food colouring rubbed into sugar gives the same effect, or leave the fritters plain and dust with icing sugar.
- "A rich batter"Victorian batters described as rich are generally enriched with egg and sometimes a little melted butter or cream, thick enough to coat rather than run. Something like 4 oz flour, 1 egg, and enough milk or light ale to make a thick cream will do; the recipe itself gives no proportions.
- Frying in butterWhole butter at frying heat will brown and burn before the batter sets. Clarified butter or ghee behaves far better, and a neutral oil with a knob of butter for flavour is the practical compromise.
- Four or five minutes is too longHalved bananas in a shallow pan of very hot fat need about a minute to a minute and a half a side, until the batter is set and golden. Longer and the fruit collapses into the coating.
- Choose the fruit carefullyFirm, just-ripe bananas hold their shape; anything spotted and soft will turn to purée inside the batter. Halve lengthways as directed and pat the cut faces dry before sugaring.
- Yield and servingSix bananas, twelve halves, serves six as a hot pudding. Best eaten straight from the pan, with cream or a squeeze of lemon to cut the sweetness.
- "Probable cost, 1s."A shilling for the dish was a real sum at the time, reflecting how recently the fruit had become available in Britain at all.
Bananas were still something of a novelty in the British kitchen when Cassell's compiled this entry. They reached Britain in commercial quantity only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, once faster steamships and, later, refrigerated holds could land the fruit before it spoiled; earlier arrivals had been rare, expensive and often overripe. That newness may explain the recipe's shape: the fruit is treated like any other fritter subject, sugared, battered and fried in the manner already applied to apples and oranges, rather than given a technique of its own. The cochineal sugar is of a piece with the period's taste for a touch of colour on a dish of plain golden fritters, insect-derived carmine being long established in British confectionery.