Marjorie Rambeau
BANANAS-RAMBEAU
Slice bananas, long way. Dip in pan filled with half powdered sugar and half flour. Brown a fairly large piece of butter. Have frying pan very hot. Fry bananas, add necessary butter at intervals.
SAUCE
Squeeze two oranges into bowl, add sugar and spices to taste, also flour to thicken slightly; then cook to boiling stage, cool, pour over fried bananas and serve. To be honest I have never mastered the art of cookery, but I give you here the recipe of a particularly novel and tasty French entré. Cordiael, yours, Maryoue Ramban
TOMATOES-PINTO
Slice tomatoes-fry brown; slice onions-fry brown.
Slice green peppers and add to onions just before they are done enough to remove from the pan. Place tomatoes on platter and pour onions and peppers over. Serve immediately, garnished with parsley.
This is one of my favorites.
Two quick pan dishes with no quantities and no timings, which is normal for a celebrity contribution of this kind. Both work; they just need the cook to supply the numbers.
- The hinge: use firm bananasBananas that are yellow with no more than a fleck of brown will hold their shape in the pan. Anything softer collapses into the sugar coating and scorches. Halve them lengthwise as directed, not crosswise.
- The dredgeHalf powdered (confectioners') sugar and half flour by volume; a quarter cup of each is enough for four bananas. Sift them together and coat just before frying, since the sugar draws out moisture and the coating goes sticky if it sits.
- "Brown a fairly large piece of butter"This is beurre noisette, butter cooked until the milk solids turn nut-brown and it smells toasted, roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons over medium heat. It goes from brown to burnt in seconds, so pull the pan the moment the foam subsides and the color turns.
- Pan heatThe recipe says "very hot," but with a sugared coating medium-high is safer than a smoking pan. The sugar caramelizes fast; expect about 1 to 2 minutes per side, and add the extra butter between batches as the recipe says, because the flour absorbs it.
- The sauce is unquantifiedTwo oranges yield roughly two-thirds of a cup of juice. Sugar and spice are left to taste, and no thickener amount is given at all; about 1 teaspoon of flour per half cup of juice gives a light nappe. Slake the flour in a little cold juice first or it will lump. Cinnamon and a scrape of nutmeg suit the dish.
- Cook the flour outBringing the juice just to a boil is the minimum. Hold it at a simmer a full minute or two so the raw flour taste cooks off, then cool as directed; the sauce is cooled before it goes over the bananas, which are presumably straight from the pan.
- YieldFour bananas and the sauce from two oranges serve four as a dessert or, as Rambeau frames it, a sweet entrée course.
- Tomatoes-PintoSlice the tomatoes thick, about half an inch, and fry them in a hot, lightly oiled pan without crowding, so they brown rather than stew. The onions want a separate pan and considerably longer — 10 to 15 minutes over medium heat — with the peppers added in the last two or three minutes so they keep some bite. Season both with salt; the original assumes it.
This page comes from Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries, a 1916 collection of recipes solicited from stage and screen performers, and the pleasure of the book lies as much in the handwriting facsimiles and the disclaimers as in the cooking. Marjorie Rambeau, then in her twenties and a Broadway leading lady on the edge of a long film career, admits outright that she never mastered the art — a common and rather charming refrain from contributors who were working actors, not housekeepers. Her calling the fried bananas a "French entrée" reflects a period habit of attaching French prestige to anything sweet, browned in butter and sauced, though sugared bananas in butter are often associated with the Caribbean and Gulf traditions that had made the fruit cheap and ubiquitous in American cities by 1916. The second dish, with its browned tomatoes, onions and green peppers, has nothing pinto about it in the bean sense; "pinto" here may perhaps be read as painted or party-colored, though the single word supports little more than a guess.