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Banana Cutlets
4 bananas 1/2 pint of English walnuts 1 teaspoon of butter 1 cup of milk 1 tablespoon of flour 1 teaspoon of salt 1 teaspoon of lemon juice Put the nuts through a nut mill and add mashed bananas; put the butter in a saucepan with the flour and milk, add the bananas and nuts. Cook for five minutes and add the salt and lemon juice. Turn into a dish to cool and form into cutlets and fry in boiling oil. Or the mixture may be put in a buttered baking dish and baked in the oven until brown.
A nut-and-banana croquette mixture bound with a thin white sauce. The whole thing hinges on the mixture being firm enough to shape, and as written it is barely that.
- The binding is the problemOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a very loose sauce, and mashed banana adds more moisture. Expect to increase the flour to three tablespoons, or work in dry breadcrumbs after cooking, or the cutlets will collapse in the fat.
- Chill properly"Turn into a dish to cool" means cool until firm, not merely warm. Spread it no more than an inch deep and refrigerate at least two hours before shaping.
- Half a pint of nutsA dry half-pint is about a cup of shelled walnut halves, roughly 3 1/2 oz, which grinds down to a scant cup. A nut mill was a small hand grinder; short pulses in a food processor do the same job, but stop before the walnuts turn to paste.
- "Boiling oil"Fat does not boil at frying temperature; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the food goes in. Use 365-375F and fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- CoatingThe original leaves the cutlets bare. A pass through beaten egg and fine crumbs makes them far more likely to survive the fryer and gives the crust the recipe is aiming at.
- Baked versionThe original gives no oven heat, only "baked in the oven until brown." A hot oven, around 400F, for 20-25 minutes is a reasonable modern equivalent, though the mixture is pale and may need longer; brush the tops with melted butter or oil, since there is nothing else to colour them.
- Lemon juice off the heatAdding acid to a hot milk sauce can make it grainy. The recipe already has you add it at the end, and it is worth pulling the pan off the burner first. It also keeps the banana from darkening.
- Salt and yieldA full teaspoon of salt reads high on paper but is defensible against so sweet a mixture; taste before shaping. The recipe gives no yield, but the quantity should make roughly eight to a dozen small cutlets.
Banana cutlets belong to the great age of the nut loaf, when vegetarian cooks set out to prove that a meatless table could be laid with the same shapes and names as a meat one: cutlets, roasts, croquettes, mock sausages. The technique here is standard croquette practice from the period, a thick white sauce used as a binder for ground nuts, and it owes much to the health-reform kitchens of the late nineteenth century, where nut and grain preparations were developed as deliberate substitutes for flesh food. What dates the recipe most precisely is the banana itself. Steam shipping and refrigerated holds had turned it from a curiosity into one of the cheapest fruits in American and British cities by the 1900s, and cookbook writers of the era pressed it into savoury service with an enthusiasm later generations did not share.