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Bananas for Fritters
Slice bananas lengthwise, cut into fourths, squeeze over them the juice of two lemons and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Let stand half an hour before dipping in batter. 2 cups scraped corn
This is a preparation note rather than a complete recipe: it tells you how to macerate the fruit and assumes you already have a fritter batter and a kettle of hot fat. The stray "2 cups scraped corn" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the book and has nothing to do with the bananas.
- What is missingNo batter, no fat, no frying time. A plain fritter batter of the period is roughly 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and about 2/3 cup milk, beaten smooth and used at once.
- The cutThe instruction is compressed: slicing lengthwise and then cutting into fourths can be read as four fingers per banana or as eight. Either way the fingers hold batter better than coins and cook through in the time the crust takes to brown.
- Why the half hour mattersThe lemon and sugar draw out a little juice and firm the surface slightly, so the pieces are less likely to disintegrate in the batter. Drain them and pat dry before dipping or the batter will slide off.
- Powdered sugarIn this era the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either works here; granulated dissolves more slowly in the lemon juice.
- FryingDeep fat at 365-375F, a few pieces at a time so the temperature does not crash. Two to three minutes, turning once, until the crust is a even gold; bananas are already soft and need no further cooking.
- Bananas to useFirm and just yellow, not spotted. Fully ripe fruit turns to pulp inside the crust and leaks sugar into the fat, which then scorches.
- Yield and servingFour bananas give roughly sixteen to thirty-two pieces depending on how the cut is read, enough for about four. Drain on paper, dust with more sugar, and serve immediately with lemon or a hard sauce; they go limp within minutes.
Bananas were a novelty in American kitchens in the 1870s and a commonplace a few decades later, thanks to fast steamer service and the fruit companies that built the Caribbean trade. Cheap, sweet and available year round, they slid straight into the existing repertoire of fritters, which cooks had long made with apples, corn, oysters and clams using the same batter and the same kettle of fat. The presence of a corn fritter fragment stuck to the end of this entry suggests something about how such books may have been assembled: contributed recipes set in tight columns, with the occasional line straying from one to the next.