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Oranges and Bananas for Dessert
Peel four bananas (the red kind if possible), cut them across into rather thin slices and arrange them in a glass dish; strain the juice from two oranges, pour it over the bananas, sprinkle them plentifully with powdered sugar and serve immediately. Or peel the oranges, slice them and arrange the slices in the dish among the slices of bananas. Cream, either whipped or plain, may be served with this dish, also sugar.
An assembly rather than a cooked dish, and it stands or falls on timing and on the sugar you reach for.
- Serve immediately means itSliced banana browns within minutes once exposed to air, and the citrus juice only slows it. Cut the fruit at the last moment, directly into the dish, and take it to the table at once.
- Powdered sugar, then and nowIn a 1896 kitchen "powdered sugar" usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match and dissolves into the juice without clouding it.
- Red bananasThe red-skinned dessert banana Oscar prefers is a distinct cultivar, shorter and denser than a Cavendish, with a faintly raspberry note. It appears in Latin and Caribbean groceries; ordinary bananas work, but choose ones still firm at the tip.
- The orange juiceTwo oranges give roughly half a cup of juice, more from large ones. Strain it as directed, since pulp and membrane make the dish look muddled in a glass bowl.
- If you slice the oranges insteadCut them into supremes, removing peel and pith with a knife rather than peeling by hand, or the white pith turns the dessert bitter. Work over a bowl to catch what runs out.
- YieldFour bananas and two oranges serve about four, or six in small coupes. The glass dish is presumably specified so that the fruit shows through.
- The creamThe recipe allows either; whipped cream should be barely sweetened, since the fruit already carries sugar.
Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the moment when out-of-season tropical fruit stopped being a luxury in American cities. Fast, ventilated steamer traffic from Central America and the Caribbean had, by the 1890s, put bananas and oranges on hotel tables year-round, and a New York dining room could offer as dessert what a generation earlier would have been a curiosity. The specification of red bananas is the tell: the trade shipped Gros Michel as its dominant export variety from the 1870s onward, but red bananas survived alongside it as a minority kind, and a Waldorf steward could still ask for the one he liked best. The recipe itself is barely a recipe, which is characteristic of the fruit-course entries in hotel cookery of the period, where the cook's job was selection and presentation rather than transformation.