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Fried Bananas
Peel and split bananas; dip each half into well-beaten egg, then into fine bread crumbs just before frying in hot oil.
A one-line recipe that assumes you know how to breed and shallow-fry. The variables it leaves out are the ripeness of the fruit and the temperature of the fat.
- RipenessUse bananas that are yellow with a few flecks but still firm to the squeeze. Fully spotted fruit collapses into mush inside the crumb coat once it heats through.
- Splitting"Split" here means lengthwise, giving two long halves per banana. Cut them crosswise into thirds first if you want pieces that turn without breaking.
- Fat and temperatureThe recipe says only "hot oil," with no temperature and no indication of whether the pan is shallow or deep. Frying fat for crumbed food is generally taken to be somewhere around 350-375F; if the fat is too cool the coating absorbs it instead of setting.
- Breading that stays onBananas are wet and slippery. A light dusting of flour before the egg gives the crumb something to grip, and the instruction to crumb "just before frying" is the real hinge — coated fruit left standing weeps and the crust slides off in the pan.
- CrumbsFine dry bread crumbs, not panko, which is what the period cook would have had from stale loaf grated through a sieve. Panko works but gives a coarser, spikier crust.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Drain on paper, then dust with powdered sugar and a little lemon, or serve with cream; left unsweetened they also work as a sweet side to ham or curry.
Bananas were still something of a novelty in North American home cooking when fruit-focused cookbooks like this one appeared. Regular steamship shipments from the Caribbean and Central America are generally credited with bringing the price down from a luxury to a fruit sold off pushcarts, and cookery writers set about showing housekeepers what to do with a fruit many had presumably encountered only raw. Frying in egg and crumbs seems to have been a common domestic-science treatment for anything unfamiliar and soft, croquettes and eggplant included, so it was the obvious first move. In Caribbean and Latin American kitchens the fried banana or plantain long predates these books, though there the fruit is usually cooked green or fully black and rarely breaded.