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Banana Sauce
1 cup water cup sugar 3 banana pulps 3 tablespoons lemon juice 2 eggs. few grains salt Boil sugar and water ten minutes. Mix remaining ingredients and pour hot syrup on to them. Beat well and serve hot.
A hot fruit sauce for puddings and ices, of a type common in turn-of-the-century American dessert chapters. It cannot be recommended as written, and the reasons are worth setting out.
- The eggs are never cookedTwo whole eggs are beaten cold with banana pulp and lemon juice, and hot syrup is poured over them. A modest quantity of boiled syrup meeting a larger volume of cold, dense purée lands the mixture short of the temperature at which egg is pasteurised, and nothing holds it there. The sauce is warm, not cooked, and carries the salmonella risk of any uncooked egg preparation. Use a current custard-sauce recipe that cooks the egg to a stated temperature.
- The sugar quantity is missingThe line reads "1 cup water cup sugar" — a fraction has dropped out of the text. There is no way to recover it with confidence, and the syrup's density, and therefore its temperature, depends entirely on it.
- Ten minutes at a boilSugar syrup boiled a full ten minutes in an open pan reduces hard. Depending on the pan and the burner it can run from thread stage well up toward soft ball, which is why the missing sugar figure matters and why the finished sauce could be anything from thin to nearly candy.
- "3 banana pulps"Three bananas, mashed or sieved; three modern ones give roughly a cup of purée.
- Why the lemon is thereThree tablespoons is a great deal of acid for three bananas. Beyond flavour it slows the enzymatic browning that turns mashed banana grey within minutes — a real concern in a sauce meant to be beaten and carried to the table.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook that ranged far beyond chocolate, and its dessert chapter is full of poured sauces for ices, cottage puddings and steamed puddings. Bananas had only become an everyday American fruit in the two decades before it was published, a shift usually credited to refrigerated steamers and, it is often said, the United Fruit Company's rail network, which made them cheap and reliable in northern cities; cookbooks of the 1900s treat them with the enthusiasm of a novelty, baking them, frying them, and folding them into creams and sauces. The method here is to boil a syrup and beat it into eggs, producing a frothy sauce.