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Cocoanut and Banana Pie
3 tablespoons orange marmalade 6 ripe bananas 4 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 3 eggs, separated Dromedary Cocoanut Line deep pie plate with pastry. Put in a layer of orange marmalade. Slice bananas, mix with sugar and vanilla, and spread over marmalade. Bake for 30 minutes in a moderate oven. Make meringue with beaten whites of eggs and one tablespoon of sugar. Sprinkle over with Dromedary Cocoanut and brown lightly in the oven.
A promotional booklet recipe, written in the shorthand of its day: the pastry is assumed, the oven is described rather than numbered, and the leftover yolks are simply abandoned. A few things need pinning down before it will work.
- The moderate ovenBake the filled shell at 350F for the 30 minutes given. For the meringue, either return it to 350F for 12-15 minutes or run it at 400F for 4-6 minutes; the coconut colours fast, so watch it from the first minute.
- Dromedary CocoanutThis was the shredded coconut sold in packets by the Hills Brothers Company, the same firm behind Dromedary dates. Ordinary sweetened flaked coconut is the closest substitute; unsweetened desiccated will brown faster and taste noticeably drier.
- The missing yolksThree eggs are separated and only the whites are used. Three whites is generous for one pie, and the recipe gives no instruction for the yolks; they can be kept for a custard or sauce. Two whites will meringue a nine-inch pie perfectly well.
- Meringue sugarOne tablespoon of sugar for three whites is very lean by modern practice and gives a soft, weepy foam. Two tablespoons per white, added slowly once the whites are frothy, gives a meringue that holds and slices.
- The pastryThe shell goes in raw under a wet filling. Blind-bake it 12-15 minutes at 400F with weights before adding the marmalade, or the base will be pale and soggy under the banana juice.
- Bananas and the bakeHalf an hour at 350F reduces sliced ripe bananas to a soft, jammy layer rather than distinct slices. Use bananas that are yellow with a few flecks, not heavily spotted, if you want any definition left.
- Marmalade quantityThree tablespoons is a thin scraping across a deep plate. Warming it briefly makes it spreadable, and doubling it is no hardship if you want the orange to register against six bananas.
- YieldThe recipe gives only a deep pie plate; a nine-inch one will take the filling and cut into about eight modest slices. Best eaten the day it is made; the meringue softens and the banana darkens overnight.
This comes from a manufacturer's recipe booklet rather than a general cookbook, and it reads like one: the branded ingredient is named in full each time it appears, and the pastry is left to the cook. Dromedary was the Hills Brothers Company's line of packaged dates, coconut and later cake mixes, and shredded coconut in a sealed carton was itself a modern convenience -- earlier cooks had to crack, drain and grate the nut themselves. Bananas belong to the same story: cheap refrigerated steamer traffic from Central America had, by the early twentieth century, turned them from a novelty into a fruit an American housewife could buy by the half-dozen without comment. A pie combining tinned marmalade, imported bananas and packet coconut would have looked distinctly cosmopolitan to a household still thinking in terms of apples and pumpkin.