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Banana Fritters
Pare six bananas, cut each in two, and split each half. Place the pieces in a bowl with two tablespoons of sugar and three tablespoons of orange juice or wine, and let this preparation stand for one hour. Then make a batter, and cook the same as apple fritters.
A short entry that leans on a recipe printed elsewhere in the book. The maceration is the only part spelled out; everything that decides success happens in the frying.
- The missing batter"Then make a batter" points back to the apple fritter recipe, which in books of this period means roughly a cup of flour, a beaten egg, a scant cup of milk and a pinch of salt beaten to the thickness of heavy cream. Some versions fold in a stiffly beaten white at the end for lightness.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat for fritters wants 365-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil; above it the coating browns before the banana inside has warmed through. A bread cube should brown in about a minute.
- Dry the fruitThe hinge of the recipe. After an hour in sugar and juice the pieces are wet, and wet fruit sheds batter in the fat. Lift each piece out, blot it, and dredge lightly in flour before dipping.
- Bananas then and nowThe fruit sold in 1911 was a different variety from today's Cavendish, so texture is not a safe assumption either way. Use bananas that are yellow but still solid at the stem; fully speckled ones collapse in the batter.
- An hour is the limitThe recipe specifies one hour and there is no reason to extend it. Orange juice and sugar soften the cut surfaces, and the longer they sit the more fragile the pieces become.
- The wine optionThe recipe does not say which wine. A fortified or sweet wine suits the dish, and the quantity is too small to matter beyond flavor.
- YieldSix bananas cut this way give twenty-four pieces, enough for six to eight at the end of a meal. Fry in batches of five or six so the fat stays hot, and serve at once.
Fritters - fruit or vegetable bound in batter and fried in deep fat - are among the oldest sweet dishes in English cookery, and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks ran long lists of them: apple, peach, banana, corn, clam, each a variation on one batter. Bananas earned their place on that list only after fast ventilated steamships, rail distribution, and the Central American trade brought the price down; through the 1880s and 1890s they went from a curiosity sold singly at fairs to a fruit an ordinary household could buy by the bunch. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the publisher of dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed squarely at the middle-class housekeeper, and its habit of saying "cook the same as apple fritters" rather than repeating the batter assumes a reader who works through the book rather than dipping into it.