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Baked Bananas
Bananas in the skin are laid on top of hot ashes and turned over once to bake thoroughly. This dish may be varied by peeling back a narrow strip of the banana skin, cutting out sections of the fruit and replacing them with marshmallows. Replace the strip, pinching the ends to hold in place and bake as directed.
A campfire recipe that needs almost nothing but ripe fruit and a bed of spent coals. The main thing the original leaves out is how long, and how to tell when it is done.
- What "hot ashes" meansA fire that has burned down until the flames are gone and the coals are grey-edged. Bananas set directly in leaping flames will char through the skin before the flesh softens.
- TimingFigure 8 to 12 minutes in ashes, turning once at the halfway mark. The skin goes black and the fruit inside is done when the peel feels slack and the banana yields to a light squeeze.
- Oven equivalentIn an oven at around 400F, 15 to 20 minutes will bake them through, though without any of the smoke of a fire. Slit the skin lengthwise first so steam escapes.
- Choosing the fruitUse bananas that are fully yellow but still firm. Overripe fruit collapses into liquid inside the skin and is difficult to eat off a plate, let alone at a campsite.
- The marshmallow variationKeep the strip of peel narrow, as the original directs, and replace it afterwards, pinching the ends to hold it. Push the marshmallows down into the cut-out sections rather than mounding them, or the filling escapes and burns on the coals.
- ServingServe in the skin with a spoon; the peel is the dish. One banana per person, and they should be eaten hot, since the flesh firms up again noticeably as it cools.
Cooking fruit in its own skin in the embers is an old campfire technique, and it turns up in scouting and outing manuals of the early twentieth century, by which time bananas had become comparatively cheap and widely available in American towns through large-scale importation from Central America. Commercially manufactured marshmallows were also common in American camp cookery by the 1910s and 1920s, and were often toasted or melted into other dishes. If the section heading is indeed 'Girlish Grub', the book would belong to the tradition of outdoor cookery written for girls' camps and Camp Fire Girls groups, whose recipes tended to need no pans and little measuring.