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Baked Bananas II
Arrange bananas in a shallow pan, cover, and bake until skins become very dark in color. Remove from skins, and become very dark in color. Remove from skins, and serve hot sprinkled with sugar.
Sautéd Bananas Remove skins from bananas, cut in halves lengthwise, and again cut in halves crosswise. Dredge with flour, and sauté cut in halves crosswise. Dredge with flour, and sauté in clarified butter. Drain, and sprinkle with powdered sugar.
Two ways with bananas from the era when the fruit was still something of a novelty on American tables. Neither gives an oven temperature or a time, so both need judgment.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names no temperature at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; bananas baked in the skin take roughly 20 to 30 minutes, depending on ripeness.
- When they are doneThe skins go from yellow to a glossy black, which looks alarming and is exactly right. The flesh inside should be soft enough to slump when the skin is slit.
- Choose firm fruitUse bananas that are just ripe, still faintly green at the stem. Fully spotted fruit collapses into something closer to a puree in the skin.
- Cover the panThe lid traps steam and keeps the fruit from drying at the edges. Foil over a shallow baking dish does the same work.
- Clarified butter for the sautéWhole butter burns at the heat needed to colour the cut faces. Clarified butter, or a neutral oil with a spoonful of butter added at the end, holds up better.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period powdered sugar is a fine-ground sugar, finer than granulated but not necessarily identical to modern confectioners' sugar. Either will melt into the hot fruit better than granulated, which sits on the surface and stays gritty.
- YieldOne banana per person as a dessert, half a banana if serving alongside ham or grilled meat.
Bananas reached American cities in quantity only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, once steamship routes from the Caribbean and Central America and refrigerated rail made the fruit something other than a luxury. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s treat them with a certain caution: raw bananas were widely believed to be hard to digest, and cooking them was recommended as a corrective. That belief may be part of why a book like this offers baked, sautéed bananas before it gets around to simply slicing one. Baking in the skin is one of several ways plantains are cooked across the Caribbean and West Africa, alongside boiling and frying.