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Banana Fritters
6 bananas
3 tablespoons orange-juice
2 tablespoons sugar
Fritter batter
Peel bananas, cut each in two and split each half. Place the pieces in a bowl with sugar and orange-juice and let them stand for one hour. Drain the fruit, dip in batter and fry in deep fat.
A straightforward recipe that leans on two things the original leaves unstated: the batter, given elsewhere in the book, and the temperature of the fat.
- The hinge: dry the fruitAfter an hour in juice and sugar the banana pieces are wet, and wet fruit sheds batter in the fat. Drain them, then blot each piece on a towel before dipping.
- Fritter batterA typical batter of this period runs about 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and 2/3 cup milk, beaten smooth and thick enough to coat a spoon. Consult the book's own fritter batter entry if you want to stay faithful to it.
- Fat temperature"Deep fat" in a 1900s kitchen was judged by how quickly a cube of bread browned in it, a test that puts the fat somewhere in the region of 360-375F. Cooler than that and the fritters absorb oil; hotter and the batter colors before the banana heats through.
- Choose firmer bananasFully ripe supermarket bananas collapse in the batter. Use fruit that is yellow but still firm at the stem end, and cut it as directed only just before macerating.
- Batch sizeSix bananas cut this way give twenty-four pieces. Fry six or eight at a time so the fat temperature holds, and drain on paper or a rack rather than a covered dish, which steams the crust soft.
- Yield and servingServes six as a light entrée or dessert course. A dusting of powdered sugar, or the drained orange syrup reduced for a minute in a small pan, is an option.
In early twentieth-century American menu planning a sweet fried fritter could stand as a legitimate middle course rather than a dessert. Bananas owe their place in books like this to the shipping trade: by the 1900s refrigerated steamships and the Central American fruit companies had made them one of the cheapest and most reliably available fruits in northern cities, cheap enough that domestic manuals printed them freely where a generation earlier a banana had been a novelty. The hour's soak in orange juice and sugar is a common period technique for macerating fruit before frying.