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Banana Jelly
Make a plain gelatine (see Introductory Recipes) with a decidedly tart flavour and add cubed or crushed bananas in quantity liked. "MUBISI" (S. African Unfermented Banana Wine) P. W. Humphreys, ("What to Eat") "A big hole is dug in the ground, lined by banana leaves, filled with unripe bananas, and kept covered by mats and earth until the fruit has become completely ripe. Then the bananas are slit, mixed with fine hay, and placed in a large, boat-like, wooden trough which at one end has an emptying pipe. After the addition of some water the whole is thoroughly mixed by the hand or by short wooden sticks. Thereupon the trough is covered with banana leaves and the mixture is left standing for about one or two hours. After the expiration of that time it is taken out and through grass sieves poured into large calabashes. It is then ready for use and represents a sweet, agreeable and not intoxicating beverage. "MUENGE" (Fermented Wine) P. W. H. "If the mubisi is left standing for three days it undergoes a fermentation and becomes a slightly acid, refreshing beverage which is strongly intoxicating. If it is filled into bottles and they are kept well corked at a cool place for several months one obtains a sparkling wine strongly resembling champagne.
The jelly itself is a two-line recipe that assumes you have already read the book's "Introductory Recipes" for plain gelatine; the two banana-wine passages that follow are travellers' descriptions rather than working instructions.
- What "plain gelatine" means hereThe book sends you to its own "Introductory Recipes" for the base; it does not say which. A modern equivalent would be about 1 tablespoon (1 envelope, 7 g) powdered gelatine or 4 sheets softened in cold water, dissolved in about 2 cups of hot sweetened liquid. Old gelatine weights are not reliably comparable to modern products, so follow the modern packet ratio.
- "Decidedly tart"Bananas are flat and sugary, so the jelly has to carry all the acid. The recipe gives no quantities; the juice of two lemons in 2 cups of liquid, with sugar to balance, is one workable reading.
- Banana is safe in gelatineUnlike fresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya or mango, banana carries no protease that will digest gelatine, so no cooking or canned fruit is needed. Slice or cube the fruit and fold it in.
- When to add the fruitLet the jelly cool to the consistency of raw egg white before folding in the banana, or the pieces float to the top and set in a single layer. Toss the cut fruit in a little lemon juice first to keep it from browning inside the clear jelly.
- Setting and yieldAbout 2 cups of jelly with a cup of fruit needs a mould of about 1½ pints and serves four. Allow four hours in the refrigerator, or overnight for a mould firm enough to turn out.
- Mubisi and muenge are ethnography, not methodBoth passages are credited to P. W. Humphreys, "What to Eat," and describe a village process: unripe bananas sweated ripe in an earth pit, pressed with grass, strained through sieves into calabashes. There are no quantities and no times you could rely on, and the pit and trough are plausibly part of the microbial system. Read them as a record of how banana beer was made, not as something to reproduce at home; if you want banana wine, use a current tested recipe with measured sanitation and a known yeast.
- The namesMubisi is the fresh, unfermented banana juice and mwenge (spelled muenge here) the fermented drink; both are Great Lakes Bantu terms (Luganda among them), from a region far from South Africa as the heading claims.
Banana jelly belongs to the moment when the banana stopped being a curiosity and became the cheapest fruit in the American grocery: fast ventilated ships and the Central American plantations of the 1880s and 1890s pushed prices down fast, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s hurried to find things to do with a fruit their readers' mothers had never cooked with. Gelatine was on the same curve, having gone from a laborious calf's-foot boiling to a packaged granulated powder, so a moulded fruit jelly was a modern, faintly luxurious dish that anyone could manage. The two banana-wine notes appended here show the other habit of the period: fruit books padded their chapters with dispatches from the tropics, quoted secondhand from magazines and travel accounts, in which the botany, geography and vocabulary were frequently garbled on the way home. The description of pit-ripening, pressing with grass and straining into calabashes is nonetheless a recognisable account of banana beer brewing as practised across the Great Lakes region of Africa, where it remains a living tradition.