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Banana Meringue
Place in a baking dish bananas peeled, scraped and cut in quarters, cutting first lengthwise, then across. Pour over them lemon and pineapple juice, one part lemon to two parts pineapple. Sprinkle generously with powdered sugar and bake, covered, for one-half hour. Take from the oven, cover with meringue and brown delicately in a cool oven.
A late-Victorian sort of recipe that assumes the cook knows meringue by heart: no quantities, no temperatures, no yield. The gaps are all fillable, but they need filling before you start.
- The oven temperaturesNo temperature is given for the covered bake; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading, but it is the editor's choice, not the book's. The "cool oven" called for over the meringue is the lower end of the period scale, somewhere below a slow oven, hot enough to set and colour the surface without weeping or shrinking away from the edges of the dish.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this vintage "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar on the shelf now. Superfine is the better match; confectioners' will work but adds starch to the syrup.
- The juiceNo amount is given. About 1/2 cup total for a dish holding four to five bananas is enough to keep them moist without stewing them, in the stated ratio of one part lemon to two parts pineapple. Canned pineapple was the likeliest source, though the recipe does not say.
- Half an hour is too longRipe bananas collapse into a puree well before thirty minutes at 350F. Fifteen to twenty minutes, covered, gives fruit that is soft and hot but still in recognisable pieces. Choose bananas that are yellow and just barely speckled, not soft-ripe.
- The meringueNone is specified. Two egg whites beaten to soft peaks with 4 tablespoons of sugar covers a dish this size. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which anchors it and stops it sliding as it bakes.
- BrowningTen to fifteen minutes in a low oven sets a soft meringue through and colours it pale gold. A broiler will brown it in a minute but leaves the interior barely warm, which is worth knowing if you are serving it to anyone who avoids undercooked egg.
- YieldFour bananas, quartered as described, serve four. Serve it hot from the dish; the fruit slumps and the meringue begins to bead within twenty minutes or so.
Baked banana desserts appear all over American cookbooks from the 1890s onward for a straightforward commercial reason: improvements in shipping and the rise of the large fruit importers turned the banana from a curiosity into one of the cheapest fruits in a northern city market. Cookbook writers of the period were working out what to do with it beyond eating it raw, and baking, frying and this sort of meringued dish were the usual answers. The pineapple juice is the other tell — canned Hawaiian pineapple came into wide circulation somewhat later, in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its acidity here does real work, both slowing the browning of the cut bananas and cutting the flatness that baked banana otherwise has. The meringue lid is a standard nineteenth-century household finish, the same one applied to lemon pie, queen of puddings and any dish where a cook had yolks spent elsewhere and whites to use up.