Banana Roll
Peel bananas and cut in halves crosswise. Roll puff or flaky paste one-eighth of an inch thick. Cut into pieces. Dip each piece in ice-water and wrap around a half banana. Place on a baking-sheet and bake in a moderate oven. Serve with a sauce made by crushing strawberries with sugar.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to handle puff paste. The one thing it does not tell you is how long to bake, so watch the pastry rather than the clock.
- Moderate ovenIn books of this period this generally means about 350-375°F (175-190°C). For puff or flaky paste a hotter start (around 400°F) for the first ten minutes or so helps the layers steam apart before finishing lower; since the recipe gives no time, bake until the pastry is set and coloured rather than to the clock.
- Why the ice-water dipThe recipe does not say. The likely purposes are that the damp surface seals the pastry to itself so the roll does not unwind in the oven, and that the cold water helps keep the butter firm while you handle the strip. Dip briefly and press the seam firmly; a soaked strip will go slack.
- "Puff or flaky paste"Presumably the laminated doughs given elsewhere in the book's pastry section. Commercial all-butter puff pastry, thawed but still cold, rolled to the specified one-eighth inch, is a fair substitute.
- Cut into piecesNo size is given. Strips about 1½ inches wide and long enough to spiral around a banana half with a slight overlap work well — usually 8-10 inches. Leave the cut ends of the banana exposed so steam can escape.
- Choosing bananasUse fruit that is ripe but firm, still faintly green at the tip. Fully ripe bananas collapse into liquid inside the pastry and leak at the ends.
- Strawberry sauceCrush hulled berries with sugar to taste — roughly 2 tablespoons per pint — and let them stand 20-30 minutes until the sugar draws out juice. No cooking is intended; this is a macerated fruit sauce, served cold against the hot pastry.
- YieldTwo halves per person is a generous serving, so four bananas (eight halves) and about 12 ounces of pastry will serve four.
Bananas were still something of a novelty dessert fruit in American households at the turn of the twentieth century, having become widely and cheaply available only after the steamship trades of the 1880s and 1890s brought Central American fruit to northern ports in quantity. Cookbooks of the period responded by finding respectable, familiar frames for the new ingredient — baking it in pastry, frying it in fritters, folding it into custards — rather than simply serving it out of hand. Wrapping a piece of fruit in a strip of puff paste and spiralling it is an old pastry-cook's trick, the same maneuver used for apple and pear "rolls," and its appearance here with strawberries and bananas together shows that trick being adapted to a fruit that was itself a modern novelty.