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Crisped Bananas, New Orleans Style
Peel and cut the bananas in two across and steep the pieces in white sugar syrup flavored with cut up oranges and nutmeg. When they have steeped an hour or two roll each piece in dry flour, giving it a good coating, and fry in olive oil or clarified fresh butter. Serve hot with the orange syrup they were steeped in strained for sauce.
A straightforward fritter that depends almost entirely on the fruit and on the fat being hot enough. The original assumes a cook who already knows what a sugar syrup is and how hot a frying pan should be.
- The hinge: dry the fruitThe hinge: drain the fruit -- Bananas come out of the syrup wet, and heavily syrup-soaked fruit can gum the flour into a paste that slips off in the pan. Lift each piece out and let it drain a minute before flouring, leaving just enough surface moisture for the flour to cling.
- White sugar syrupRead this as a simple syrup: sugar and water in roughly equal parts, boiled and cooled, will do, though period pastry work used syrups of a range of densities. A cup of each is enough for four bananas.
- Cut up orangesSlices or segments with the peel on, steeped in the warm syrup for flavour and oil from the zest. Strain them out before the syrup goes to table, as the recipe directs.
- NutmegGrate it fresh into the warm syrup. Pre-ground nutmeg from a tin has lost most of what makes this worth doing.
- Choosing bananasFirm and just ripe, with no brown on the skin. Fully ripe fruit collapses in the syrup and again in the pan. Halving "across" gives short thick pieces; halving lengthwise as well makes them easier to turn.
- The frying fatClarified butter is arguably the better of the two options, and the recipe already specifies clarified, since milk solids will burn before the coating colours. Olive oil then sold into American kitchens was generally milder than a peppery extra-virgin. Shallow-fry in moderately hot fat -- around 350F by a modern thermometer, though the book names no temperature -- until the flour crust is set and pale gold, a couple of minutes a side.
- The sauceThe steeping syrup will be thin and diluted by juice from the fruit. Strain it and simmer it down for a few minutes until it coats a spoon, then spoon it hot over the fritters.
- YieldFour bananas make eight to sixteen pieces, enough for four as a dessert. Fry in batches and hold on a rack in a low oven; stacked on a plate they steam and the crust softens.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the trade-manual tradition of the 1890s and 1900s, written for hotel and restaurant pastry departments rather than home kitchens, which is why the instructions assume so much and measure so little. Bananas were still a relatively new everyday luxury in the United States at that point: regular steamer traffic from Central America and the Caribbean through Gulf ports, New Orleans chief among them, had turned them from a curiosity into cheap fruit within a generation, and New Orleans was one of the great banana-landing cities of the era. That trade is probably what lies behind the "New Orleans style" label here, though the recipe itself does not say. The dish sits in the same family as the fried and flambeed banana desserts the city later became famous for, though the celebrated tableside version at Brennan's dates from the mid-twentieth century and has no direct connection to this earlier fritter.