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Banana Croquettes
Remove skins from bananas, scrape, using a silver knife to remove the astringent principle which lies close to skin, and cut in halves crosswise; then remove a slice from each end. Dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper.
A two-line recipe from the era when bananas were still novel enough to be treated as a cooked entrée. The technique is straightforward; the details that matter are fruit ripeness and fat temperature.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; period books judged deep fat by how quickly a cube of bread browned. Something around 375F suits a crumbed coating: much below and the crumbs absorb oil and the banana collapses before the crust sets; much above and the outside colors before the inside warms through. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The silver knifeThe instruction reflects a period belief that steel discolors fruit and that an "astringent principle" sits under the peel. What is actually there are the phloem strands, the stringy bits; scraping them off is worth doing for texture. Any knife will serve — modern stainless does not react with the fruit.
- Choose firm fruitUse bananas that are ripe but still firm, with no brown freckling. Fully ripe fruit turns to purée inside the crust and bursts it.
- Breading orderThe text says crumbs, egg, crumbs. A light dusting of flour first gives the egg something to grip on the slick cut surface, and the finished coat holds together far better. Beat the egg with a spoonful of water or milk to thin it.
- Chill before fryingNot in the original, but the breaded pieces hold their shape much better after fifteen minutes in the refrigerator. It firms both fruit and coating.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drain of the period. Use a wire rack over a sheet pan; paper towels underneath catch drips but sitting directly on them steams the underside soft.
- Yield and servingThe recipe halves each banana crosswise, so each fruit gives two croquettes; it does not say how many bananas to use. In cookery of this period an entrée is a small made dish served between heavier courses, not a main.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared in 1896, at a point when bananas had gone from curiosity to commonplace in American cities within a single generation, carried north by fast ventilated steamship from Central America and the Caribbean. Cookbooks of the 1890s show the result: bananas turn up baked, fried, in fritters and, as here, crumbed and deep-fried in the French croquette manner that dominated genteel American cooking of the decade. The croquette itself was a badge of trained-cook competence, and the fruit version sat in the ambiguous space between vegetable accompaniment and sweet, which is why it is filed among entr"u00e9es rather than desserts. The caution about a silver knife is a survival of an older kitchen belief, repeated in many books of the period, that steel blades imparted an off taste to fruit.