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Banana Nut Strips
To two cups of mashed banana pulp add one cup each of oatflakes, flour, chopped nuts, and sugar with a half-cup of shortening and saltspoon of salt (or more). Roll out a quarter of an inch thick and cut in strips. Bake in brisk oven.
A one-bowl banana bar dough from the era when cookbooks were still coaxing American cooks into using the newly cheap banana. The proportions work, but the original assumes you know how to handle a soft, sticky dough and what "brisk" means at the oven door.
- Brisk ovenRead this as roughly 400-425F. For a quarter-inch strip that is hot enough to set the edges quickly; start checking at about 10 minutes. If your bananas were very ripe and the dough is wet, the lower end of that range for a few minutes longer gives a more even bake.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The recipe's own "(or more)" is sound advice: with a cup of sugar and half a cup of shortening, a half teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- OatflakesRolled oats, the ordinary old-fashioned kind. Quick oats will work and give a softer strip; steel-cut oats will not soften in the time given.
- ShorteningIn American books of this period this could mean lard or, later, hydrogenated vegetable fat. Butter is the easiest substitute and improves the flavour; use it softened, not melted, or the dough slackens further.
- Handling the doughTwo cups of mashed banana makes a dough far softer than a rolled cookie dough. Chill it at least an hour, roll between two sheets of parchment, and cut the strips on the paper rather than trying to lift them. Extra flour worked in to make it rollable will make the strips tough.
- Banana quantityTwo cups of pulp is about four to five medium bananas, well ripened and spotted. Underripe fruit gives a starchy, faintly astringent result and will not sweeten the dough.
- YieldA large batch: this much dough rolled a quarter-inch thick makes far more than an ordinary cookie recipe, so count on well over three dozen strips about 1 inch by 3 inches. They keep two or three days in a tin and soften as they sit.
Banana recipes multiply in American cookbooks from the 1890s onward, and the reason is shipping rather than cooking. Steamers with holds built to carry fruit and the rail networks of the big fruit importers turned the banana from an occasional luxury into a fruit sold by the dozen in ordinary markets, and books like this one appeared partly to tell housewives what to do with a fruit their mothers had rarely handled. Such books tend to push the banana well past the fruit bowl into breads, puddings, fritters and bars of this kind. The strip itself belongs to the broad family of oat-and-fruit bars that flourished when rolled oats became a branded packaged staple, a cheap bulk ingredient that stretched sugar and fat and gave a keeping quality no soft cake had.