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Banana Fritters
3 bananas. 1 cup flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder 1½ tablespoons sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt ⅙ cup milk 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 egg Mash the bananas and mix the flour with the salt, sugar and baking powder. Combine the dry ingredients with the bananas, alternating with the milk. Add lemon juice and the egg, beaten light. Drop by spoonfuls into deep fat and fry. Drain on paper and sprinkle with powdered sugar.
The ingredient list has come through incomplete — the flour and the bananas themselves are missing from it, and one measurement is garbled — so treat this as a working framework rather than a fixed formula.
- Missing quantitiesNeither the flour nor the bananas appear in the ingredient list, though both are called for in the method. A batter of this type generally runs about 1 cup flour to 2 or 3 mashed bananas; the original gives no figure and there is no way to recover it from the page.
- "16 cup milk"Clearly a misprint; 1/2 cup is a reasonable reading and would suit the leavening and egg, but the original figure cannot be recovered. Add it gradually -- bananas vary in wetness, and the batter should be thick enough to hold its shape on the spoon.
- Deep fat temperatureThe book assumes you judge the fat by eye or by a bread cube. Modern practice is 365-375F. Below that the fritters soak; above it the outsides colour before the batter sets around the fruit.
- Size and batchingDrop tablespoon-sized spoonfuls, six or so at a time, and turn them once. Crowding the pot drops the temperature sharply. Two to three minutes total is usually enough for the interior to set.
- The lemon juicePossibly there to keep the mashed banana from browning as well as for flavour, though the recipe itself adds it late, after the bananas and milk are already combined.
- Banana ripenessWell-speckled fruit mashes smooth and is sweet enough that the 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar is sufficient. Underripe bananas stay in lumps and taste starchy inside the fritter.
- Draining"Drain on paper" meant brown paper or a clean cloth; a wire rack over a tray works better still, since paper traps steam under the fritter. Dust with powdered sugar while they are hot so it clings.
- YieldWith one egg and roughly a cup of flour, expect about 16 to 18 small fritters — four servings as a sweet side or dessert. They do not hold; serve within minutes of frying.
- Filed under VegetablesNot necessarily an error in this book's logic. Fritters were often sent up as a hot side dish with the meat course, which may explain a sweetened banana batter sitting among the vegetables.
Fritters of this kind -- a leavened batter carrying fruit, dropped into deep fat -- were standard American cookbook fare by the late nineteenth century, and bananas entered the repertoire as improved shipping and rail distribution made them cheap and widely available in the United States from the 1880s onward. Placing banana fritters among the vegetables reflects an older service pattern in which sweet fritters, glazed sweet potatoes and fried apples all counted as accompaniments to roast meat rather than as dessert.