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Banana Toast
Lay slices of banana between thin bread, buttered, in baking-pan and place in hot oven till lightly browned. Serve immediately. Or make Banana Pudding Sauce with one pint milk, tablespoon each butter, cornstarch and sugar, pinch of salt, and pulp of four bananas stirred in just before serving, when pour the whole over slices of thin, crisp toast.
Two dishes in one entry: a baked banana sandwich and a banana custard sauce poured over toast. Both are simple, but the sauce is where the technique matters.
- "Hot oven"In turn-of-the-century terms usually somewhere around 400-450F. The sandwiches only need to colour, so start checking early; the butter on the outside of the bread is what browns.
- Butter the outside tooThe instruction reads as buttering the inside faces, but a thin film of butter on the top and bottom of the sandwich is what gives the crisp, evenly browned crust the recipe expects. Press the sandwiches lightly so they hold together.
- Choose the banana by dishFor the baked sandwich use a banana that is ripe but still firm, or the slices collapse into the bread. For the sauce use fruit that is heavily freckled and soft, since it supplies all the sweetness beyond the single spoon of sugar.
- The sauce is a thin cornstarch custardOne pint of milk to one tablespoon of cornstarch gives a pouring sauce, not a pudding. Slake the cornstarch in a little cold milk first, then cook the rest with the butter, sugar and salt, whisk in the slurry and simmer a full minute or two so the starch loses its raw taste.
- Bananas go in off the heatThis is the hinge of the second version. The recipe says the pulp is stirred in just before serving; banana pulp held in hot milk darkens and takes on a stewed flavour, so stir it in after the pan leaves the burner and serve at once.
- "Pulp of four bananas"Mash or sieve them rather than slicing. Four medium bananas is roughly 1 1/2 cups of pulp, enough to thicken the pint of milk noticeably on its own.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but a pint of milk and four bananas would stretch to about four servings. Make the toast thin and dry it well, or it goes to pieces under the sauce.
Banana recipes crowd American cookbooks from the 1880s onward for a straightforward reason: fast steamships and the fruit companies' rail networks turned the banana from a rarity into one of the cheapest fruits at the grocer's. Writers responded by fitting it into forms already familiar to their readers, which is why so many of these entries are bananas in place of something else -- banana fritters, banana pie, banana ice cream, and here a banana version of the milk-toast that was a standard nursery and invalid supper of the period. Milk toast, bread softened under hot seasoned milk, was considered gentle food for the sick and the elderly, and bananas carried the same reputation as an easily digested fruit, so the pairing may well have seemed sensible rather than novel to a period cook. The first version, baked between buttered bread, is essentially an early hot banana sandwich, a dish that stayed in American home cooking long after the milk-toast habit faded.