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Bananas, Baked
This fruit as a vegetable in place of sweet potatoes or peas, is served at formal or informal dinners with roast lamb, broiled chops, broiled breast of chicken, etc. Peel and cut in half lengthwise as many bananas as desired, half of one usually being enough for a single helping. For each half melt one teaspoon of butter in one tablespoon of hot water. Arrange the slices in a flat earthen dish and pour this mixture over them. Sprinkle with granulated sugar and a tiny bit of salt. Over this squeeze a little lemon juice with perhaps a dash of nutmeg or a little allspice. Bake twenty-five minutes, or until brown, and place around the meat.
BOSTON BAKED BEANS, No. I-Much of the excellence of this dish depends upon the kind of bean pot used. It should be of earthenware, with a narrow mouth and bulging sides. Soak one quart of pea beans in cold water over night; in the morning place them in fresh water, and simmer gently until soft enough to pierce with a pin, being careful that they do not boil long enough to break. If desired, a small onion may be boiled with the beans. When they are soft, turn them into a colander, pour cold water through them, and place them, when well drained, in the bean pot. Pour boiling water over a quarter of a pound of salt pork that is part fat and part lean. Scrape the rind until white, cut it in half-inch strips, and bury the meat in the beans, leaving only the rind exposed. Mix together one teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of dry mustard and a fourth of a cup of molasses.. Place these in a cup, fill the cup with hot water, stir until well. mixed, and pour the liquid over the beans and pork. Add enough water to cover the beans, and bake eight hours, adding water to keep them covered, until the last hour, when the pork should be raised to the surface to crisp. If pork is disliked, it may be omitted; more salt must then be used, together with one-third of a cup of butter; or half a pound of fat and lean corned beef may be substituted.
BOSTON BAKED BEANS, No. 2-This recipe has been used. most successfully for many years, and the work is quickly done.. Do not soak the beans over night. Place one quart of pea beans: over the fire, cover them with cold water, and slowly bring the water to a boil; then set the kettle where the beans will just bubble, but will at no time boil hard. When they have cooked in this way for fifteen minutes, add a four-inch square, of salt pork to the kettle, and simmer gently with the beans until they may be pierced with a pin, but are not at all broken; then turn the beans into a colander to drain. Place together in a coffeecup two large tablespoons of molasses, one teaspoon of salt and one-fourth of a teaspoon of pepper, and fill with some of the hot water in which the beans were boiled. Place the beans in the bean pot, turn over them the cup of seasoning, and stir well. until thoroughly mixed. Cut the rind of the pork in small. squares, sink the meat in the beans, leaving only the rind exposed; add more bean water until the rind is covered, and bake two hours, raising the pork during the last three-quarters of an hour, to brown and crisp the top. More baking may be allowed if there is time for it before serving.
Three recipes run together here: baked bananas as a vegetable side, and two versions of Boston baked beans. Neither gives an oven temperature, which is the main gap to fill.
- Oven temperature for the bananasNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits the dish: twenty-five minutes at 350F will soften the fruit and lightly caramelize the sugar; give it a few minutes under the broiler if you want real browning.
- Oven temperature for the beansAn eight-hour bean pot implies a slow oven, roughly 250-275F; the two-hour version in No. 2 would need something nearer 325-350F to finish in the time. The book says nothing about a lid, though a traditional bean pot has one; if you cover it, uncover for the final browning.
- Choose ripe but firm bananasUse bananas that are yellow with no green at the tip and no brown spotting. Fully spotted fruit collapses into mush in half an hour of baking, and the dish is meant to hold its shape beside the roast.
- Butter and water for each halfOne teaspoon butter melted in one tablespoon hot water per banana half scales exactly: four halves, four teaspoons butter and four tablespoons water. It is a basting liquid rather than a sauce.
- Pea beansPea beans are what is now sold as navy beans. One quart dry is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb and will serve eight to ten; it swells to well over two quarts cooked, so use a pot with real headroom.
- Salt pork and the "four-inch square"Salt pork is still sold, usually in slabs near the bacon. A four-inch square is about 1/2 lb. Rinsing or blanching it, as No. 1 directs with boiling water, pulls out surplus salt; taste before adding the teaspoon of salt in the seasoning cup.
- The hinge: do not let the beans breakBoth recipes insist the beans be pierceable but whole before they go in the pot. Beans boiled hard split and turn to paste during the long bake. Keep the pre-cook at a bare bubble, and stop as soon as a pin goes through.
- Keep them coveredThe liquid must stay above the beans until the last hour, or the top layer dries into pebbles. Check every hour or so and top up with hot water — or better, the reserved bean cooking water, which carries flavor.
- The bean potThe narrow-mouthed bulging pot limits evaporation and forces slow, even heat. A heavy Dutch oven with a tight lid does the same job; a wide shallow casserole does not, and will need much more topping up.
- Serving the bananasHalf a banana per person, arranged around the meat, as the book says. It is a sweet-savory garnish in the manner of baked apples with pork, not a dessert course.
Bananas as a dinner vegetable rather than a fruit make sense in the context of the early 1900s, when refrigerated steamships and the United Fruit Company's Central American plantations had turned the banana from a costly curiosity into one of the cheapest fruits in the American market. Cookbooks of the period cast about for things to do with the glut, and treating them like sweet potatoes — buttered, sugared, spiced, baked and set around a roast — was a common answer. The baked beans that follow are the older tradition by far: Saturday-night beans slow-baked in an earthenware pot with salt pork and molasses are generally traced to colonial New England, where the long unattended bake suited a Sabbath that began at sundown and the molasses came up from the West Indies trade. That Butterick prints two versions, one overnight-soaked and eight hours in the oven, the other "quickly done" in two, shows a household manual hedging between the way it had always been done and the way a cook with less time could manage.