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Banana Compote
Divide the bananas in regular pieces; arrange them in slices on your compote dish, one slice leaning against the other in a circle. Sprinkle them with sugar. Squeeze the juice of an orange and of half a lemon--this would be sufficient for six bananas--and pour it over the bananas. Cover the dish and leave it for two hours in a cold place. A mold of cornflour or of ground rice may be eaten with this.
An uncooked compote that relies entirely on citrus and time. Two details need translating: the sugar is unmeasured, and "cornflour" is not what an American reader will assume.
- Cornflour means cornstarchIn this British-published Belgian book, cornflour is cornstarch, and "a mold of cornflour" is a stiff cornstarch blancmange turned out of a mold. Ground rice makes the same pudding with a slightly grainier body. Neither is cornmeal.
- Compote without cookingMost compotes of the period were fruit stewed in syrup. Here the acid and sugar do the work cold, drawing juice from the fruit into a light syrup over the two hours. Do not be tempted to heat it.
- How much sugarNone is specified. For six bananas, 3 to 4 tablespoons of granulated sugar is about right; taste after an hour, since ripe fruit needs less and the citrus varies.
- The citrus is doing two jobsThe juice of one orange and half a lemon flavours the dish and also keeps the cut faces from browning. Pour it over immediately after slicing and turn the pieces once so every surface is wetted, or the top of the arrangement will grey.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe wants slices that will stand and lean against one another in a circle, so cut them thick enough to hold their shape; something around a quarter inch works. Very thin rounds are more likely to soften during the two-hour rest.
- "A cold place"A cool larder or cellar in 1915; the refrigerator now. The recipe asks for two hours, and there is no reason to push much past that, since the bananas go on softening as they sit.
- YieldSix bananas serve four to six as written, or six comfortably alongside the cornstarch mold.
The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915, assembled from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and its proceeds went to relief work; the measurements are loose throughout. Bananas were reaching northern Europe in growing quantity by this period on steamers from the Canaries and the Caribbean, though how far they had stopped being a luxury is harder to say. The word compote comes from the same root as "composite" and originally meant fruit cooked and held in syrup; by this period it had loosened to mean almost any dish of dressed fruit served at the end of a meal. Pairing it with a molded cornstarch or ground-rice pudding is a nineteenth-century habit -- a bland, cold, sliceable mold was a common partner to sharp, juicy fruit.