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Baked Bananas
The banana may be baked whole, one side of the skin being stripped back in this case, or it may be peeled and cut in halves or quarters. The fruit should be placed in a baking-pan sprinkled with cinnamon, a half-cup of sugar, a pinch of salt, and tiny bits of butter. Pour into the pan a half-cup of water and baste frequently while baking in a quick oven. Lemon juice may be substituted for cinnamon, making it into a syrup before baking, then pouring over the fruit when placed in oven. Apples may be baked with the peeled bananas, with delicious results, adding a dash of lemon juice.
A short, forgiving recipe that assumes you know your oven. The only real variables are the ripeness of the fruit and how often you baste.
- "A quick oven"A hot one, somewhere in the region of 400-450F by modern reckoning; the recipe gives no figure. Peeled bananas will want only a short bake, whole ones in their skins rather longer. Watch rather than time them, since the sugar and butter will begin to catch once the water cooks off.
- Quantities are for a panfulThe half-cup of sugar, half-cup of water and pinch of salt suit roughly 4 to 6 bananas in a single layer. Halve the sugar if the fruit is heavily speckled and already sweet.
- Choose firm fruitBananas just past green-tipped hold their shape; fully brown-spotted ones collapse into a puree in a hot oven.
- Stripping the skinPeel one strip of skin back like a lid rather than removing it, so the fruit steams in its own jacket while the exposed surface browns. Set them cut-side up and they will not roll.
- Basting is the pointThere is no covering here, so the half-cup of water plus butter and sugar becomes the basting syrup. Spoon it over every five minutes or so; unattended, it reduces to caramel on the pan and scorches.
- The lemon variation"making it into a syrup before baking" means dissolving the sugar in the water with the lemon juice over heat first, then pouring the hot syrup over the fruit. The recipe gives no quantity of lemon juice; judge it by taste against the half-cup of sugar.
- Baking with applesApples need far longer than bananas. Start sliced apples in the pan on their own for 15-20 minutes, then add the bananas for the last stretch, or the bananas will be mush before the apples are tender.
- Yield and servingServe hot, with the pan syrup spooned over. Cream suits the sweetness.
Bananas were a novelty in North American and British kitchens not long before books like this one appeared; regular steamship shipments from the Caribbean and Central America in the 1870s and 1880s are generally credited with turning them from an exhibition curiosity into a widely sold fruit, though cheapness on the scale of a true staple is usually dated nearer the turn of the century, and cookbook writers scrambled to tell readers what to do with them beyond eating them out of hand. Baking with sugar, butter and cinnamon was a natural first move, since it treats the banana like a cooking plantain or a baked apple, both already familiar. The alternative lemon syrup and the apple pairing in this entry point the same way: an unfamiliar tropical fruit made legible by borrowing the seasonings of the temperate orchard.