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Lovers' Delight
71 Slice a banana in two. Place a spoonful vanilla ice cream in the center, and top off with maraschino cherries, and pour cherry syrup over it.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three components assembled to order, with the proportions left to the dispenser. A few conventions of the trade need spelling out.
- "Slice a banana in two"Almost certainly a lengthwise split, peeled, the halves laid cut-side up in a boat or oval sundae dish; "in the center" only makes sense that way. Cutting it crosswise gives you two stubs and nowhere to put the ice cream.
- A "spoonful" of ice creamOne generous scoop is the intent, set in the trough between the halves. The recipe leaves the size to the dispenser.
- Maraschino cherriesThe fountain cherries of this era were preserved in a light syrup and colored; today's jarred maraschinos are the same idea, brine-cured and sweetened, and work as written. Cherries in genuine maraschino liqueur are a different, drier, more bitter product and will dominate the dish.
- Cherry syrupThis is the same bottled fountain syrup used for cherry phosphates and cherry sodas, not pie filling and not grenadine. Drained syrup from a jar of maraschinos, reduced slightly, is the closest quick substitute; use about 1 to 2 tablespoons so the banana is glazed rather than flooded.
- Order of assemblyBuild it just before serving and pour the syrup last. Banana halves darken within a few minutes of cutting, and a plated banana split held even briefly goes soft and weeping.
- YieldOne serving. The fountain sold these singly, and the recipe scales by simple repetition.
Numbered items like this one come from the dispenser's manual tradition: a working list of fountain combinations, each with a trade name to be chalked on a board, so that a clerk could produce an unfamiliar order without instruction. "Lovers' Delight" belongs to a whole family of such sentimental trade names that sold essentially the same handful of ingredients in new arrangements. The split banana with ice cream between the halves is generally traced to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, around 1904, and credited by tradition to a druggist's apprentice named David Strickler, though several towns claim the invention and the documentation is thin. It seems likely that the form spread quickly once bananas became cheap and reliably available in American cities through the fruit-import trade, and that the soda fountain rather than the restaurant kitchen was where it lived.