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Banana Marmalade
Make a syrup of two cups of sugar to one of water and cook till it strings from the spoon. Stir into it then the crushed or cubed pulp of four bananas and cook slowly (where there is no danger of burning) until thick. (About fifteen minutes). The addition of lemon, currant, or other tart fruit juice relieves the intense sweetness but does not detract from the banana flavour.
A two-ingredient sugar preserve with fruit stirred into finished syrup. It is quick, but the sugar work at the start decides whether it succeeds.
- "Strings from the spoon"This is the thread stage, roughly 230-234F on a candy thermometer, when a drizzle from the spoon falls in a fine thread rather than in drops. Boil the two cups sugar to one of water until it behaves that way, and take it off before it colours.
- QuantitiesFour bananas gives roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of pulp against 2 cups of sugar, which is why the original notes the sweetness is intense. The recipe offers lemon, currant or other tart juice as an option; two to three tablespoons of lemon juice is a reasonable amount if you want it.
- "Where there is no danger of burning"The usual expedients were the cooler back of the range or a double boiler; a heavy-bottomed pan over low heat, stirred often, does the same. The thick banana pulp catches on the bottom readily once the mixture starts to reduce.
- It will not set like jamBananas carry very little pectin and little acid, so this thickens by evaporation and by the sugar concentration alone. Expect a thick, spoonable conserve rather than something that gels on a chilled plate.
- RipenessUse fruit that is fully spotted and soft. Underripe bananas stay starchy and taste faintly green under all that sugar.
- Fifteen minutes is a guideJudge by behaviour rather than the clock: the mass should mound on the spoon and a track drawn through it with a spatula should close only slowly.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly two cups, depending on how far it is reduced. Treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use it within two weeks; the low acidity of banana means it is not a candidate for water-bath canning under modern guidelines.
Recipe collections from the turn of the twentieth century took a new interest in the banana because the fruit had only recently become cheap and constant in northern cities, arriving by refrigerated steamer from Central America and the Caribbean rather than as an occasional luxury. Cooks who knew what to do with apples and quinces are unlikely to have had much inherited guidance for it, and a book of this kind would presumably have worked through the possibilities methodically; here the fruit is boiled down with sugar. The word marmalade is generally traced to the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and by this period it had loosened in English to mean almost any fruit cooked thick with sugar; the author's own hedging about "intense sweetness" suggests the result was closer to a candy than to the citrus preserves the name now calls to mind.