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Bananas, Fried
Peel and split the fruit, put some butter in a pan, and when boiling place the fruit in it. When brown on both sides remove them, place on kitchen paper to drain, sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve very hot. Serve with beefsteak.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know what a browned banana should look like. The only real variables are the ripeness of the fruit and the heat of the pan.
- Fruit choiceUse bananas that are yellow and firm, not soft-spotted. Fully ripe fruit collapses into mush before it colours; slightly underripe holds its shape and browns cleanly.
- "Split the fruit"Lengthwise, into two long halves. Quartering them lengthwise gives more browned surface if you prefer.
- Butter "when boiling"The period phrase for butter hot and bubbling in the pan; read it as a moderately hot pan rather than a fierce one. Whole butter browns fast at this stage, so keep the pan moving; clarified butter gives you more room for error.
- TimingThe recipe gives none; a couple of minutes a side is a reasonable guide, depending on heat and ripeness. Turn once, with a thin spatula, and only when the cut face has taken colour, or the slices tear.
- Kitchen paperPeriod phrasing for absorbent paper. Paper towel works; drain briefly, as bananas cool quickly.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage generally sugar ground fine; modern confectioners' sugar or superfine sugar both suit. Nutmeg or lime would not be out of keeping, though the recipe calls for neither.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; reckon on about one banana per person as a side dish. Fry in batches rather than crowding the pan, which steams the fruit instead of browning it.
- Serving with beefsteakNot a mistake. This is a savoury-adjacent side, sweet against salt and beef fat, and it wants to reach the table hot from the pan.
Bananas appear under Vegetables here rather than among the desserts, which tells you something about how the fruit was understood in American kitchens around 1900: cheap, newly abundant thanks to steamships and the Caribbean trade, and still being sorted into a place on the menu. Frying plantains and cooking bananas in fat is long-established practice across the Caribbean and Latin America. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book as part of a broad line of domestic guides.