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Banana Sandwiches
A very ripe banana mashed and put between slices of buttered Five Roses bread makes a very nutritious and appetizing sandwich.
About as short as a recipe gets, and the whole of it rests on the ripeness of the fruit and the freshness of the bread.
- How ripe is very ripeThe banana should be heavily freckled or nearly black-skinned, soft enough to mash smooth with a fork. An underripe banana stays lumpy, tastes starchy and turns the sandwich chalky.
- Butter both slicesThe butter is not just seasoning here; it seals the crumb against the wet mash so the bread does not go soggy within minutes. Soften it first so spreading does not tear a fresh soft loaf.
- BrowningMashed banana begins to discolour quite quickly. A few drops of lemon juice worked into the mash slows it and sharpens the flavour, though the original leaves the fruit plain.
- Five Roses breadFive Roses was a Lake of the Woods Milling Company flour brand, and the book is steering you to its own white loaf. Any soft white sandwich bread gives the same result.
- YieldOne large banana will fill roughly two rounds of sandwiches, though the recipe gives no quantity.
Bananas moved from luxury to everyday grocery in North America between the 1880s and the 1910s, as steamship refrigeration and rail distribution made the fruit cheap and reliable inland as well as in port cities. Cookbooks of that generation are full of small notices like this one, teaching households what to do with a fruit their parents had rarely seen; the banana turns up sliced into salads, baked, folded into gelatine desserts and, as here, simply mashed on bread. The framing as "nutritious" reflects the period's enthusiasm for the banana as a wholesome food for children and invalids, an idea the fruit trade encouraged heavily. The Five Roses Cook Book, first issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in 1913 and compiled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, was a promotional book, which is why the flour brand appears inside the instruction itself.