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Bananas with Rice
Bananas stewed or baked may be served with rice sweetened or plain boiled, the rice heaped in the centre with a border of the fruit.
BANANA FRITTERS (In Halves) Let bananas stand for an hour in a deep dish with lemon juice and sugar sprinkled over them, also the grated rind of an orange if convenient. Then cut bananas in half and dip each piece in batter (see Fritter Batter; Introductory Recipes). When brown drain and serve with sugar (powdered) sprinkled over them. BANANA FRITTERS (Crushed) OR PANCAKES Crush pulp of six bananas and to this add the beaten yolks of two eggs, a little salt, a tablespoon each of butter and sugar, one and a half cups of flour, and small teaspoon of baking-powder. Add beaten whites of eggs last and drop from spoon into frying kettle. Serve as above. For pancakes make a thinner batter, putting fruit through sieve and cook as for the regular pancake.
Three loosely linked ideas sit in one paragraph here: stewed or baked bananas with rice, halved bananas in fritter batter, and a crushed-banana drop fritter that doubles as pancake batter. Only the third gives quantities, and it needs the most attention.
- The missing batterThe halved-banana version sends you to a "Fritter Batter" in the book's introductory recipes, which is not on this page. Any standard fritter batter works: roughly 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and about 2/3 cup milk, beaten smooth and rested 20 minutes.
- Frying temperature"Frying kettle" means deep fat. The book gives no test; period books commonly judged the fat by a cube of bread browning in something under a minute. A modern equivalent is about 360-375F. Below that the fritters absorb grease; above it the crust can colour before the banana interior heats through.
- The crushed batter is stiff on purposeThe crushed batter is the thicker of the two -- Six mashed bananas, two yolks and 1 1/2 cups flour give a batter thick enough to drop from a spoon, and the recipe's own instruction to make a thinner batter for pancakes confirms it is not meant to be loosened for fritters. For the pancake variant the pulp is put through a sieve, which gives a smoother batter to spread on the griddle.
- Fold the whites lastThe whites go in after the flour and are the only lift beyond a small teaspoon of baking powder. Fold, do not beat, and fry within a few minutes.
- Bananas of the periodThe bananas shipped at the turn of the century were largely Gros Michel, not the Cavendish sold today. Use fruit that is fully yellow but still firm; heavily spotted fruit will collapse in the fat when halved.
- Baking or stewing for the rice dishThe first line gives no times or heat. A moderate oven, around 350F, for 15-20 minutes will do for baked bananas, or stew peeled halves briefly in a little water, sugar and lemon until translucent. Taken too far they turn to puree, which defeats the border arrangement.
- Macerating timeThe bananas stand whole in lemon juice and sugar for an hour and are only halved afterwards. Besides flavouring, the acid helps keep the fruit from browning before it meets the batter.
- YieldThe crushed batter should make somewhere around 18 to 20 small fritters. The halved-banana version gives no quantity; allow a banana per person, cut in two.
Bananas were a novelty in North American kitchens in the 1870s and an everyday grocery by 1900, once fast steamships and the United Fruit trade made Central American cargo reliable; cookbooks of the era responded with pages of instructions, because readers genuinely did not know what to do with the fruit beyond eating it out of hand. Much of that advice, as here, treats the banana as a cooking fruit rather than a dessert fruit, which reflects both the firmer varieties then shipped and a lingering suspicion that raw tropical fruit was hard to digest. The rice pairing is the older habit showing through: sweetened boiled rice with a border of stewed fruit recurs often enough in Victorian cookbooks to look like a common pattern in nursery and invalid cookery, and the banana simply took the place a stewed apple or prune would have held a generation earlier. The fritter, meanwhile, was the all-purpose Victorian solution to any fruit at all, and the pancake note at the end shows how casually a household cook was expected to move between one batter and another.