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Peanut Butter and Banana
1/2 cup peanut butter 1/4 cup cream or hot water Lemon-juice 1/2 cup banana pulp or 2 bananas Mix the peanut butter with the cream until smooth and light in color, then combine with banana pulp and lemon-juice, or slice banana over layer of peanut butter on bread.
A straightforward sandwich filling from the era when peanut butter was still stiff, oily and in need of thinning. The lemon juice is not a flavour note so much as insurance against browning.
- Thinning the peanut butterThe instruction to beat in cream or hot water until the mixture pales assumes an old-style peanut butter that separated and set hard. Modern commercial peanut butter is already emulsified and soft, so start with half the liquid and add more only if it will not spread.
- Lemon juice quantityNo amount is given. A teaspoon per two bananas is enough to keep the pulp from greying without making the filling sour.
- Banana pulpMash ripe but firm fruit with a fork rather than blending it; a purée goes watery quickly and soaks the bread. The recipe treats 1/2 cup of pulp as the equivalent of two bananas.
- Two versions, one recipeThe mixed filling holds better for wrapped or packed sandwiches. The sliced version, banana laid over a spread layer, tastes fresher but should be eaten at once.
- Cream or waterCream will tend to give a richer spread, hot water a looser one. Neither keeps well, so mix only what you need.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities make roughly a cup and a quarter of filling, enough for four to six sandwiches depending on how thickly it is spread.
- BreadA soft white or wholewheat sandwich loaf suits it. Butter the bread lightly on the banana side if the sandwich is to sit for more than an hour.
Peanut butter reached American home cooks in the 1890s and 1900s as a health food, promoted through sanatoriums and vegetarian cookery before it became a children's staple, and early cookbooks lean heavily on it as a sandwich spread. Bananas were by then cheap and widely available in American cities thanks to the refrigerated steamship trade, which is why they turn up so freely in books of this period, in salads, gelatines and fillings as well as eaten out of hand. The pairing appears in sandwich chapters through the 1920s and 1930s, well before it acquired its later associations with lunch boxes and Elvis Presley. The instruction to beat the peanut butter until it lightens is a reminder that it was then sold stiff and unstabilised, closer to what is now labelled natural.