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Banana Croquettes
6 bananas 1 tablespoon milk 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup bread crumbs 1 cup drippings or oil Peel bananas and scrape off coarse fiber, cut in half and dust with a little salt. Dip bananas in egg beaten with cold milk; roll in bread crumbs. After all twelve pieces are dipped in crumbs, fry in smoking hot drippings or oil, about four at a time, and drain on brown paper. Serve with jelly sauce or dust with powdered sugar.
A straightforward shallow- or deep-fry of halved bananas in an egg-and-crumb coat. The only real difficulty is that bananas soften fast, so everything depends on the fruit's ripeness and on the fat being hot enough to set the crust before the interior collapses.
- Use firm, barely ripe fruitBananas that are yellow with green tips hold their shape; heavily spotted fruit turns to purée inside the coating and bursts. This is the hinge of the recipe.
- "Smoking hot" is too hot for most oils"Smoking hot" is a visual cue, not a measurement -- the usual modern working range for this kind of frying is around 365-375F. Drippings smoke well below the point at which a refined high-smoke-point oil would, so with oil there is no need to take the fat to visible smoke.
- DrippingsRendered beef or pork fat, saved from roasting. It gives a savoury edge that suits the jelly sauce more than the powdered sugar; refined vegetable oil is the neutral substitute.
- Bread crumbsDry, fine crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse panko now sold under the name. Panko works but gives a much shaggier crust than the book intends.
- Cut lengthwise, not crosswiseCut lengthwise or crosswise -- The recipe says only to cut in half, and either cut yields the twelve pieces it mentions. A lengthwise split gives a flatter piece that fries through in about the time the crust takes to colour.
- Double-crumb if the coat leaksA single pass of egg and crumbs is thin over a wet fruit. A second dip in egg and crumbs seals the cut faces and keeps the banana from weeping into the fat.
- DrainingBrown paper means unbleached kraft, the grocer's bag. A wire rack over a tray drains better and keeps the underside crisp; paper towel will do if the pieces are moved off it promptly.
- Jelly saucePeriod shorthand for a tart jelly, currant being a common choice, melted with a little water or wine until pourable. The recipe yields twelve pieces; serve immediately, as the coating softens within minutes.
Banana croquettes belong to a moment when the fruit had just become cheap and ordinary in American kitchens. Large-scale banana importing from Central America and the Caribbean, expanding steadily from the 1870s onward, took the banana from an expensive curiosity to a staple that cookbooks felt obliged to find uses for beyond eating out of hand. Croquette recipes of this era were a catch-all technique -- bind, coat, fry -- applied to almost anything, most often chicken, rice, veal and potato. Frying bananas is far older than the American croquette, of course, and is standard practice across West Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia; what marks this version is the European crumb-and-egg jacket and the choice between a jelly sauce and a dusting of sugar, which leaves the cook to decide at the last moment whether the dish is a vegetable course or a pudding.