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Banana Fritters
Peel and cut into halves (if large) the bananas and soak in a mixture of rum and sugar. Then take out and dip them into a thin batter, plunge into a fryingpan of boiling lard, and fry to a light brown. Then take out, drain, drop into powdered sugar, and serve with sweet sauce or syrup poured over them.
Oscar assumes a professional pastry station: a standing frying batter, a kettle of rendered lard at temperature, and a sauce already made. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- "Boiling lard" is 350-375F"Boiling lard" -- lard does not boil at cooking temperatures; the phrase indicated fat hot enough to shimmer and sizzle the moment food touches it. Modern practice for fritters is roughly 350-375F; a thermometer held near 360F works well. Much cooler and the batter drinks fat and the fritters go heavy; much hotter and the lard will begin to smoke and break down.
- The batterNo formula is given because the kitchen had one on hand. A thin frying batter is roughly 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and about 3/4 cup milk — it should coat a spoon and run off in a sheet, not cling in a lump. Beaten egg white folded in at the end gives a lighter result.
- The maceration is the hingeTwenty to thirty minutes in rum and sugar is enough. Bananas soften fast and can go mushy if left much longer, and wet fruit sheds its batter in the fat. Lift the pieces out and blot them dry before dipping.
- Choose firm fruitSlightly underripe bananas, still faintly green at the tip, hold their shape. Fully spotted fruit turns to purée inside the shell of batter. Halve them lengthwise as well as crosswise if they are large, so the centre heats through in the two to three minutes the crust needs.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the phrase usually meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either works; superfine sugar sticks well to a hot, just-drained fritter and does not cake.
- Sweet sauceA period "sweet sauce" could mean a hard sauce, a thin custard, or a warmed apricot glaze. Rum syrup — sugar and water boiled to a light syrup, then a splash of the soaking rum off the heat — echoes the maceration and takes two minutes.
- Yield and timingYield depends on the cut: four bananas halved give eight fritters, quartered about sixteen — enough for four as a dessert. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature, drain on a rack rather than paper, and serve at once; fritters do not hold.
Fritters of every description were a fixture of American hotel menus in the 1890s, appearing as an entremets between the roast and the dessert course as much as at the end of a meal, and bananas had only recently become cheap enough for that role. Regular steamer traffic from Central America and the Caribbean, and the refrigerated rail cars that followed, turned the banana into a staple of the New York hotel kitchen — its debut is often traced to the 1876 Centennial, though bananas were already arriving in commercial quantity before then. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print, collected the house repertoire in 1896 with exactly this kind of shorthand: the batter, the sauce and the frying fat are all assumed knowledge. The rum soak is the older European technique — the same treatment given to apple and pineapple fritters in French practice — applied to a new and fashionable fruit.