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Banana Fritters
1¾ cups pastry flour 11/2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 cup milk 2 eggs, beaten separately 1/4 teaspoon salt Sift flour, then measure, add baking powder, salt and sugar, sift three times, then add milk and well beaten eggs. Dip fruit into batter and drop in boiling hot fat like doughnuts.
A branded batter recipe from a baking powder company's promotional book, written for cooks who already knew how to fry doughnuts. The fractions run together in the original transcription: read them as 1¾ cups flour and 1½ level teaspoons baking powder.
- The hinge: fold the whites in lastThe hinge: "2 eggs, beaten separately" almost certainly means yolks and whites in different bowls, the usual period phrasing. The recipe only says to add milk and the well beaten eggs, but the conventional handling is to beat the yolks into the milk and fold the stiffly beaten whites in at the end; that lift is what keeps fritters from turning into dense fried dough.
- Fat temperature"Boiling hot fat like doughnuts" gives no number; the modern equivalent for doughnut fat is usually put at about 365–375F. Below that the fritters soak up grease; much above it and the outside colors before the banana warms through. Frying only a few at a time keeps the temperature from crashing.
- Sift, measure, sift againSifting before measuring gives a lighter cup than scooping, and the three additional siftings distribute the baking powder. If you weigh instead, 1¾ cups sifted pastry flour comes to roughly 175–190 g depending on how lightly it is handled.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than modern all-purpose. All-purpose with about two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch will get you close, though that swap is really the cake-flour substitute and lands a little softer than true pastry flour; or simply use all-purpose and accept a slightly chewier coating.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was an alum (sodium aluminum sulfate) and phosphate powder, the type that acts twice, and the whole reason this booklet exists. Any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same measure.
- Preparing the bananasThe recipe assumes you know: peel, then halve crosswise and lengthwise, or cut into thick diagonal slices. Pat them dry or the batter slides off. Firm, barely-ripe fruit holds its shape; very soft bananas collapse in the fat.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; this quantity of batter will coat several bananas' worth of pieces. Drain on paper, dust with powdered sugar or roll in cinnamon sugar, and serve hot, as fritters soften quickly on standing.
- Batter timingMix it just before frying. A double-acting powder does give a second rise in the hot fat, so standing is less ruinous than with a single-acting powder, but a batter left half an hour will have lost some of its first-action gas on the counter.
Reliable Recipes was a giveaway cookbook issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and like most such booklets it exists to put the brand name inside a measurement — note that the baking powder is the only ingredient identified by maker. Bananas appear here because by the early twentieth century they had stopped being a luxury: refrigerated steamships and the growth of the American fruit trade put them in ordinary grocery stores year-round, cheaper than most native fruit, and cookbooks of the period scramble to find things to do with them beyond eating them out of hand. Fritters were the obvious answer, since the technique was already familiar from apple fritters and doughnuts and the batter is the same one a cook would use for either. Deep frying at home in lard or a beef-fat compound was routine kitchen work then, done in a plain iron kettle and judged by eye — a cube of bread browning in a minute was the usual test, thermometers being far from standard equipment.