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Banana Cup Cake
One cup of sugar, three of flour, one and a fourth cups of banana pulp, and two teaspoons of baking-powder.
Grate orange or lemon peel over the top and bake.
BANANA AND NUT LOAF (For Tea Cake or Pudding) To one cup crushed banana pulp add one cup each of chopped nuts, grated cocoanut, oatflakes and cracker or breadcrumbs, and one-half cup sugar. Into this sprinkle two teaspoons each of butter and baking-powder, one of salt, and sufficient flour to bind together in thick batter. Bake in moderate oven forty-five minutes.
Two related formulas from a period when banana pulp was being promoted as a substitute for both fat and eggs. Read them as fruit-bound quick breads rather than as modern butter cakes, and expect a dense, moist crumb.
- The batter is drier than you expectOne cup sugar to three cups flour with only 1 1/4 cups mashed banana as the sole liquid will not come together as a pourable batter. You will likely need to add milk or water a few tablespoons at a time until it drops heavily from the spoon; the original gives no liquid at all.
- No fat and no eggsThe cup cake has neither; the pulp is doing the moistening and binding. Expect a dense, chewy crumb that is best eaten fresh. A quarter cup of melted butter will not offend the recipe's intent and improves the second day.
- "Cup cake" hereIn this period the term usually means a cake measured in cups rather than a cake baked in a paper cup, though the batter works either way. The original gives neither temperature nor time; as a starting point, muffin tins 20-25 minutes at 375F, a loaf or square tin 40-50 minutes at 350F.
- Moderate oven350F for the nut loaf, forty-five minutes as written. Test the centre with a skewer — the coconut and banana hold a great deal of moisture and the loaf can look done well before it is.
- Oatflakes and cracker crumbsOatflakes are rolled oats, the ordinary old-fashioned kind, used dry. Cracker crumbs means plain unsweetened soda crackers; saltines crushed fine are the closest match, and if you use salted ones, cut the teaspoon of salt to a scant half.
- CocoanutGrated coconut in this period was often unsweetened, either fresh or the dried desiccated sort. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will push the loaf noticeably sweeter — reduce the half cup of sugar if that is all you have.
- Two teaspoons of butterThat is genuinely all the fat the nut loaf calls for, though many cooks will want more. The chopped nuts supply most of the richness.
- Grated peelGrating orange or lemon zest over the top before baking, rather than into the batter, gives a faintly bitter aromatic crust. Use a fine grater and take only the coloured layer.
- YieldThe cup cake makes something on the order of twenty muffin-sized cakes, or a large square tin. The nut loaf, at five cups or more of bulk before the binding flour, fills a standard 9x5 loaf tin and serves eight to ten as tea cake.
Both of these come out of the brief American vogue, roughly 1890 to 1920, for the banana as a serious cooking ingredient rather than a dessert eaten out of hand. Steamship traffic and the consolidation of the Central American trade had made bananas cheap and reliable in northern cities for the first time, and fruit companies and household writers alike produced pamphlets urging cooks to bake with them and dry them. The first recipe has neither butter nor eggs, leaving the banana pulp to do the moistening and binding work. The nut loaf, with its oatflakes, cracker crumbs and coconut, belongs to the same era's enthusiasm for "health" loaves built from whatever wholesome dry goods the pantry held, offered here indifferently as a tea cake or a pudding depending on whether it was sliced cold or served warm with sauce.