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The Wentworth
Split a banana in two. Put a ladleful of vanilla ice cream in the center, and pour over cherry syrup. Add chopped nuts.
A soda-fountain banana split in its plainest form, written for someone standing behind a marble counter with everything already at hand. A few of the assumptions need spelling out.
- "Split a banana in two"Presumably lengthwise, laid cut side up; the recipe does not say whether the peel is removed. Any shallow oval dish works.
- A ladlefulFountain ice cream was portioned with a ladle or a conical scoop running roughly 2 to 2.5 ounces, which is about one modern scoop, a quarter to a third of a cup.
- Cherry syrupNot cherry pie filling and not maraschino brine. Fountain cherry syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavored and colored with cherry, of the kind also used for cherry sodas. A thick cherry sundae topping is the closest thing on a shelf now.
- Chopped nutsPeanuts or walnuts would be the likely choice, chopped fine and kept dry. Toast them briefly if they have gone soft.
- Order of assemblyIce cream first, syrup poured over so it runs down into the banana, nuts last so they stay on top rather than sinking. Serve immediately, since a split banana browns and softens within a few minutes.
- YieldOne serving, generous by modern standards for a single dessert and easily shared between two.
Sundaes filled the pages of soda-fountain manuals in the years when American drugstore counters were doing a brisk trade in things that were emphatically not liquor. The banana split is usually traced to soda fountains in the first decade of the twentieth century, with several towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio claiming the invention and no single claim fully documented; bananas had become cheap and reliably available in American cities by then through the Caribbean fruit trade, and fountain operators seized on them. Sundaes were commonly named after places, people and hotels, and the same three or four components were recombined and rebranded endlessly, so that a fountain could offer a page of house specialties from one tub of vanilla and a rack of syrup bottles.