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Banana Sauce
2 Large Ripe Bananas 4 Tablespoons Lemon Juice 1/4 Cup Sugar 1/4 Cup Corn Syrup 2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 11/4 Cups Boiling Water Mash the bananas and rub through sieve into a saucepan. Cover immediately with lemon juice to prevent discoloration. Mix the cornstarch and sugar, add to fruit, pour on the boiling water and stir till it thickens. Cook 10 minutes. Strain and beat well.
A cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce for plain puddings, cottage puddings and steamed puddings. The method has one gap and one quantity that needs reading carefully.
- The missing corn syrupThe ingredient list calls for 1/4 cup corn syrup but the method never mentions it. Add it with the sugar and cornstarch; it keeps the sauce glossy and stops the sugar graining as it cools.
- The water quantity"11/4 Cups" is 1 1/4 cups, not eleven quarters. That gives a pourable sauce; less will set to a pudding once cold.
- Slurry the starchMixing the cornstarch with the dry sugar first is the whole trick here, and it works — the sugar crystals keep the starch grains apart so the boiling water does not seize them into lumps. Pour the water in a thin stream while stirring.
- Cook the ten minutesThis is not padding. Cornstarch thickens well before it is cooked out, and a sauce pulled at the first thickening tastes chalky. Ten minutes over low heat, stirring, dispels the raw starch flavour.
- Acid and starchFour tablespoons of lemon juice is a lot of acid for a starch sauce, and prolonged boiling in acid breaks cornstarch down and thins it. Keep the heat gentle at the simmer rather than at a rolling boil.
- Sieving twiceThe bananas go through a sieve at the start and the finished sauce is strained again. With ripe fruit and a whisk you can skip the second straining, though it does catch any stringy fibre from the banana.
- Ripeness"Large ripe" means heavily freckled, not merely yellow. Underripe bananas taste starchy and green, and there is no long cooking here to develop them.
- YieldThe listed quantities come to considerably more than a pint of finished sauce. Serve warm; it thickens noticeably as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Banana sauce belongs to a particular moment in American home cooking, when the banana had turned from a curiosity into a staple. Through the last quarter of the nineteenth century steam shipping and rail brought Central American fruit to inland grocers cheaply and reliably, and by the 1900s and 1910s cookbooks were full of banana fritters, banana custards and banana ice creams — the enthusiasm of a novelty that had suddenly become affordable. The sauce itself follows the standard pattern of the period's "pudding sauces": a cornstarch base, sugar, boiling water, and whatever fruit or flavouring was to hand, ladled over the plain steamed and baked puddings that are often said to have ended everyday dinners. That it appears in a bride's cook book is telling. These volumes, by tradition compiled by church groups or given as wedding presents, assumed a young woman who could follow a list but had not yet built a repertoire, and a cheap sauce that dressed up a plain pudding was exactly the sort of thing they meant to teach.