Banana Roll
Peel bananas and cut in halves crosswise. Roll puff or flaky paste one-eighth of an inch thick. Cut into pieces. Dip each piece in ice-water and wrap around a half banana. Place on a baking-sheet and bake in a moderate oven. Serve with a sauce made by crushing strawberries with sugar.
A simple pastry-wrapped fruit dessert from the era when puff paste was a weekly kitchen job rather than a freezer item. The instructions are terse, so a few numbers are worth filling in.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350-375F. Puff paste actually wants a hotter start, around 400-425F, to get lift before the butter melts out; if you use commercial puff pastry, follow the temperature on its package rather than the book's.
- The ice-water dipPeriod pastry recipes often moisten paste to help a seam stick, and chilling the cut paste also firms the butter layers. Dip briefly and wrap; resting the tray in the refrigerator for about fifteen minutes before baking will help the parcels hold their shape.
- "Cut into pieces"No dimensions are given. For a half banana you want a rectangle roughly 4 by 6 inches, enough to wrap once with a small overlap and to tuck the ends.
- Puff or flaky pasteFlaky paste in books of this period is generally a simpler, less-folded pastry than full puff. Either works; all-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed and rolled to one-eighth inch, is the closest modern substitute.
- Banana choiceUse fruit that is ripe but still firm, with no brown flesh. Overripe bananas collapse to a wet purée inside the pastry and soak the base. A squeeze of lemon on the cut faces keeps them from browning while you roll.
- DonenessBake 20-25 minutes, until the pastry is deep golden and the underside is dry and crisp. Pale pastry here means raw layers, since the banana gives off steam the whole time.
- The sauceCrushed strawberries with sugar, left to stand twenty minutes, makes a loose macerated sauce rather than a cooked coulis. About a pint of berries to two or three tablespoons of sugar is right for six rolls.
- YieldThree bananas give six rolls, which serves six as a dessert.
Bananas moved from luxury to everyday fruit in American kitchens between the 1880s and the 1920s, as improvements in shipping and rail transport made green fruit from Central America cheaper and more reliably available in northern cities. Cookbooks of that stretch are full of experiments in what to do with them beyond eating them out of hand: banana fritters, banana ice cream, baked bananas, and wrapped constructions like this one. The strawberry sauce, uncooked and merely crushed with sugar, is a period habit that has aged well.