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Baked Bananas for Breakfast
Peel the fruit and cut it in halves lengthwise Lay these strips in close order in a baking pan, strew sugar over and some bits of fresh butter and bake in a moderate oven about half an hour. The fruit should be basted while baking with a few spoonfuls of butter and sugar syrup and should come out glazed. Serve warm.
A straightforward baked fruit dish that needs only a few decisions made explicit: oven heat, pan size, and how long bananas can actually stand up to dry heat.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in this period is generally taken as about 350-375F. At that heat the sugar and butter will reduce to a syrup without scorching at the pan edges.
- Time is the variable, not the ruleHalf an hour suits firm, barely ripe fruit. Fully ripe bananas collapse into puree in 15 to 20 minutes, so start checking early and pull them while the halves still hold their shape.
- Choose underripe fruitYellow with green tips is right. Spotted dessert-ripe bananas are already soft and sweet enough that baking only breaks them down.
- The basting syrupThe recipe assumes you have butter and sugar syrup at hand. Melt 2 tablespoons butter with 2 tablespoons sugar and a spoonful of water, and spoon it over two or three times during baking; that repeated basting is what produces the glaze.
- Pan and packing"Close order" matters. Bananas laid snugly cut-side up in a shallow buttered dish steam each other gently and stay moist; spread out on a sheet pan they dry and brown unevenly.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given. Figure four bananas, about 1/4 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons butter for four servings, in a dish roughly 8 by 8 inches.
- ServingServe warm, as directed; the syrup sets sticky and the fruit turns gluey as it cools. Cream, a squeeze of lemon or a little grated nutmeg all suit it, and lemon in particular cuts the sweetness.
Baked or broiled bananas appear in American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, in step with the steamship trade that brought Central American and Caribbean fruit into northern cities cheaply and reliably for the first time. What had been an expensive curiosity at mid-century was, by 1900, common enough to turn up at breakfast, and cookbook writers were busy telling readers what to do with it beyond eating it out of hand. Cooking bananas with butter and sugar is long established across the tropics where they grow, usually with plantains and usually fried; this baked, basted, glazed treatment is the pastry cook's version, borrowing the technique used for baked apples and pears and applying it to a newly available fruit.