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Bananas Baked in Skins
Bake bananas in skins in moderate oven till skins are dark in color and soft. Remove from skins, sprinkle with sugar and few drops lemon juice apiece. Serve hot, sprinkled with finely chopped salted pecan meats.
A three-line dessert that depends entirely on ripeness and on not overbaking. Firm, barely yellow fruit will stay starchy no matter how long it sits in the oven.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Expect the skins to blacken and go slack in roughly 20 to 30 minutes for medium bananas, less if they were already speckled going in; the recipe itself gives neither temperature nor time and tells you to judge by the skin.
- Choose ripe fruitThe sugar in the recipe is a finishing touch, not a rescue. Use bananas with brown freckles on the skin; green-shouldered fruit bakes to a chalky, tannic texture.
- Bake them on a panThe skins split and weep a dark syrup as they cook. Set them on a rimmed sheet or a piece of parchment rather than directly on the rack.
- Getting them out of the skinSlit the skin lengthwise and lift the fruit with a spoon while it is hot; once it cools the flesh clings and tears. Serve in the split skin if you would rather not handle it at all.
- Salted pecansToast pecan halves in a dry pan, toss with a little melted butter and salt, then chop. Pre-salted commercial nuts work but are often stale enough to taste of old oil.
- Sugar and lemonThe recipe specifies only sugar and a "few drops" of juice apiece, so quantities are to taste; about a teaspoon of sugar and four or five drops of juice per banana suits most palates. Both go on after baking, as instructed.
- YieldOne banana per person as a dessert, two if it is standing in as the sweet end of a light supper. The recipe scales directly.
Baking bananas in the skin is a technique long used where the fruit grows, and it reached American cookbooks as cheap Central American fruit became widely available in the later nineteenth century, when faster steamship routes and improved shipping turned the banana from a costly novelty into an everyday grocery item. Writers of the period were casting about for ways to serve it beyond slicing it over cereal. The pairing with pecans places this squarely in American taste of the time, when salted nuts were a fashionable garnish for sweet dishes.