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Grilled Bananas
Select fat bananas of equal size-one for each person. Lay them on a grill and put over a medium flame. After they are hot on one side turn the other cheek and repeat until the skin has turned dark all over, and by pressing with the back of a spoon you can feel that the fruit has softened inside. This will take 15-20 minutes, depending on size. Put the grilled bananas on a hot platter and hustle them to the table, where the diner opens his own by slitting the blackish skin lengthwise and pushing it back. A tablespoon of fine moist sugar should be sprinkled from end to end of the opened hot fruit and a generous dash of cinnamon added. The rich odor of the steam escaping right under his nostrils adds to the eater's delight.
The secret of success for this dish is: The fruit must be served and eaten while piping hot, since grilled bananas collapse and become sodden if they are kept waiting, and their flavor deteriorates rapidly, whether opened or not. Therefore they cannot be reheated with success.
To get the fullest savor from a grilled banana do it on an outdoor fireplace.
Our national scope for the enjoyment of bananas is much too limited. This delicious fruit comes in every size, from tiny "fig" and "ladyfinger" bananas to long, slim "silver" ones and the toothsome green and starchy plantain, used mostly for frying. In skin color bananas range from pale green and flecked gold to red, almost completing a rainbow. In fact the only thing about them that never changes is their shape.
We have a great deal to learn about this staff of life of tropical America. When it first appeared in our northern markets, more than half a century ago, many people gobbled it, skin and all, and even now it is sold and eaten too green and indigestible. The easiest way to overcome this is to wrap a "hand" of bananas in cloth or paper and let them quickly ripen until the little freckles of sugar show on the skin. Then you can enjoy their full perfumy flavor, and then only.
A campfire dessert that needs almost nothing but ripe fruit and attention to timing. The one rule that governs everything else is stated in the original: they must go from grill to mouth without pause.
- Ripeness firstThe fruit should be fully ripe, with brown freckling on the skin, before it goes near the fire. Grilling softens a green banana but does not convert its starch to sugar, and the result is chalky.
- Heat and grill heightA "medium flame" over wood coals means the fire has burned down to grey-ashed embers. The original gives no grate height or temperature; on a gas grill, a medium setting.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes is what the text gives, depending on size; smaller fruit over a hotter grate will need less. Judge by the spoon test in the text rather than the clock, and soft all along the length, not just at the ends.
- Fine moist sugarThis is the period term for soft light brown sugar with the molasses still in it, damp enough to clump. Demerara or turbinado also works; ordinary white granulated is thinner in flavor here.
- Plantains are not a substituteThe text mentions plantains in passing but they are a frying fruit, as it says. A plantain grilled this way stays firm and starchy and wants far longer over the coals.
- Serve immediatelyThe warning about collapse is accurate. The fruit continues cooking in its own steam inside the skin, and within a few minutes of leaving the fire it slumps into something watery. Grill them last, after everything else has come off.
- YieldOne banana per person, as directed.
- IndoorsSomething similar can be done on a sheet pan in a hot oven, turning once, though the original gives no oven method and an oven supplies none of the smoke the text is really after.