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Banana Cake with Jelly Sauce
1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 2 tablespoons sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup milk 4 bananas 1 egg Sift the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt into a bowl; add the milk and well-beaten egg; mix well. Peel and scrape the bananas; cut in halves, lengthwise, then across. Pour batter into greased shallow pan, place the bananas on top and sprinkle with sugar. Bake in moderate oven 15 minutes. Serve with jelly sauce.
A thin pouring batter baked under sliced bananas — closer to a cobbler or a clafoutis than a layer cake. Two things the original leaves out: the pan size and the sauce itself.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F; the book itself gives no temperatures. A thin batter under fruit may well need longer than the stated 15 minutes, so start checking at 20. It is done when the batter has set around the fruit and a skewer comes out clean.
- "Shallow pan"An 8-inch square or a 9-inch round pie plate is right. The batter should go in no more than half an inch deep so the bananas sit proud of it; in a deep pan the fruit sinks and steams.
- "Scrape the bananas"This means running a knife blade down the peeled fruit to strip off the pale stringy phloem bundles. Cosmetic more than anything; the direction turns up in cookbooks of the period and takes a moment.
- The baking powderTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour is generous by modern standards — this is an advertising cookbook and the leavening is the point. One and a half teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder gives a cleaner result with less metallic aftertaste.
- Mix and bake promptlyThe cream-of-tartar powders of the period were largely single-acting, so the batter was meant to go straight into the oven. Modern powders are more forgiving, but there is nothing to gain by letting a thin batter stand.
- Jelly sauceNot given anywhere in the recipe. A reconstruction along the lines used at the time: melt about half a cup of currant or apple jelly with two tablespoons of water and a squeeze of lemon, whisk smooth, and serve warm and thin enough to pour.
- YieldFour to six servings, cut in squares and turned out or spooned from the pan while still warm.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a genre that dominated American home baking literature from the 1890s onward: the free or near-free booklet issued by a leavening manufacturer, in which every recipe calls for the brand by name. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, marketed hard against the cheaper alum-based competition, and its pamphlets pushed quick batters and cakes precisely because those dishes showcase what a chemical leavener does. Bananas turn up constantly in such books from the 1900s and 1910s he United Fruit Company's Central American trade had made them one of the cheapest and most reliably available fruits in the American grocery, and they were often said to undercut domestic fruit out of season. Serving a plain baked pudding under a sauce of melted jelly was ordinary household economy: it used up a jar of preserves and dressed a very simple dish for the table.