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Bananas Stewed
4 bananas 1/2 pint water 3 ounces lump sugar Peel, and slice the bananas, and either stew or bake them in a jar in the water and sugar until tender. The juice should be syrup.
A four-ingredient stewed fruit that depends almost entirely on how long it sits over heat. Bananas collapse far faster than the apples and pears this method was designed for.
- The hinge: cook brieflySliced bananas soften in five to eight minutes in simmering syrup and turn to mush shortly after. "Until tender" here means barely yielding, not falling apart; pull them the moment a slice gives to a spoon.
- Half a pint of waterIf the book is British, that is 10 fluid ounces, about 1 1/4 cups; an American half pint is 8 fluid ounces. Either works, since the liquid is meant to reduce to syrup, but the smaller quantity gets you there sooner.
- Lump sugarRefined white sugar in solid pieces, either broken from a loaf or in the pressed cubes sold for the tea table. Three ounces is a scant half cup of granulated sugar by weight.
- Make the syrup firstThe instruction to reduce the juice to syrup is hard to obey with the fruit still in the pan. Dissolve the sugar in the water and let it boil down a little before the bananas go in, or lift the cooked slices out and reduce the liquid around them.
- Baking in a jarA stoneware or heavy glass jar with a lid. The recipe names no oven heat; a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 20 to 25 minutes will do. Stand it in a tin of hot water if the jar is thin, and never put cold glass into a hot oven.
- RipenessFirm, just-yellow bananas hold their shape. Anything spotted and soft will disintegrate into the syrup, which is not a disaster but is a different dish.
- Yield and servingServes four as a light dessert. A strip of lemon peel or a split vanilla pod in the syrup, and cold cream alongside, suit the dish and improve it considerably.
Stewed fruit under a syrup was an everyday sweet course on British and American tables well into the twentieth century, and cookbooks commonly handled bananas as they handled apples, plums and rhubarb: peel, sugar, water, heat. Bananas moved from luxury curiosity to a widely available import in the early twentieth century as refrigerated shipping and the plantation trade developed, and cooks folded them into the existing repertoire rather than inventing new treatments for them. Fruit desserts also suited vegetarian and reform cookery, which leaned on fresh and dried fruit and needed no stock, suet or gelatine.