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Banana Fritters
2 bananas Juice of 1/2 orange 1 dessertspoon of sugar Batter Cut the bananas in quarters lengthwise. Lay them in a small deep dish, and sprinkle them with the sugar; then squeeze the orange juice over them. Let them lie in the juice for three or four hours, and then drain them carefully, and dip them in frying batter, and fry them in oil.
A simple fried fruit dessert whose only real difficulty is the batter the original assumes you already know how to make. The one thing that decides success is getting the macerated fruit dry before it goes into the batter.
- Drying the fruitAfter three or four hours in sugar and orange juice the banana is wet and slick, and wet fruit sheds batter in the pan. Drain, then blot each piece dry on a towel before dipping.
- "Batter"The original assumes a frying batter given elsewhere or already known to the cook. Any standard fritter batter works: roughly 1 cup flour, a pinch of salt, an egg and enough milk or water to make a coating about the thickness of heavy cream, with or without a little baking powder.
- A dessertspoonTwo teaspoons, sitting between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. It was a real piece of flatware, not an approximation.
- Frying temperature"fry them in oil" gives no depth or heat. If frying deep, modern practice puts fritters at about 365-375F: cooler and the batter absorbs oil, hotter and the outside colors before the banana heats through. Two to three minutes, turning once, should do it.
- Choice of bananaUse bananas that are ripe but still firm at the stem end. Fully spotted fruit turns to purée inside the crust and will burst the coating in the fat.
- CuttingQuartering lengthwise gives four long spears from each banana. They are fragile once macerated, so lift them with a spatula or two forks rather than by hand.
- Yield and servingTwo bananas make eight fritters, enough for two people as a dessert. Drain on paper, dust with powdered sugar, and serve at once; they go soft within minutes.
Fritters were a staple of the nineteenth-century sweet course: batter, hot fat, and whatever fruit was on hand. Bananas belong to the later end of that tradition, becoming a common grocery item in Britain and the United States only as the import trade expanded from the 1880s onward, with refrigerated banana shipping arriving around the turn of the twentieth century; cookbooks of the following decades often treat the fruit as a novelty to be baked, fried and turned into custards. Frying in oil rather than in beef suet or lard would suit a meatless cookery book. The long soak in orange juice and sugar seasons the fruit, and the acid may also firm the cut surfaces a little before frying.