Home › Left-Over Cereals › Rice with Bananas
Rice with Bananas
Peel and scrape three well-ripened bananas and mash them with a fork to a smooth, creamy pulp, adding a very few drops of lemon-juice. Stir this lightly into one cup of cold cooked rice and serve with or without sweetened cream. This is nutritious dish, and attractive to children. Bananas have a much better flavor if purchased a little green, and if each one is then wrapped carefully in waxed paper, put in a clean, covered box a with a little excelsior, and ripened in a dry, warm place.
See pages 165-66.
A no-cook assembly dish built on leftover boiled rice. It stands or falls on the ripeness of the fruit and the texture of the rice.
- The hinge: fully ripe bananasBananas with green shoulders are starchy and astringent and will not mash to a cream. Wait for skins heavily freckled with brown, when the starch has converted to sugar.
- "Scrape" the fruitMost likely running the fork or a knife back along the peeled banana to lift off the fibrous strings; those strands survive mashing.
- The lemon juiceA few drops only, to slow browning. More than about a quarter teaspoon for three bananas and the dish reads as sour rather than sweet.
- Rice textureCold cooked rice will have firmed into clumps. Break it up with a fork or your fingers before folding in the pulp, or you will get pockets of dry grain.
- Fold, do not beat"Stir lightly" is deliberate. Working the mixture crushes the grains and turns the whole thing to paste.
- Sweetened creamHeavy or light cream with a spoonful of sugar stirred in, poured over at the table. Unsweetened yogurt or plain milk works if you want less richness.
- Yield and timingTwo modest servings, or three for children. Assemble shortly before serving; mashed banana greys fairly quickly even with the lemon juice.
- The ripening instructionsExcelsior is fine wood shavings, once standard packing material. A paper bag on the counter does the same job of trapping the fruit's own ethylene; skip the refrigerator, which blackens the skins and stalls ripening.
Domestic-science writers of the early twentieth century were pressing home economy as a moral as much as a financial matter, and a cup of cold rice was exactly the sort of remnant a household was expected to account for. Bananas belong to the same moment for a different reason: large-scale steamship importing had turned them from a luxury into one of the cheapest fruits in American cities by the 1900s, and they arrived green by necessity, which is why the author bothers to explain how to finish ripening them at home rather than simply telling the reader to buy ripe fruit. The note that the dish is "nutritious" and "attractive to children" is the period's standard framing for invalid and nursery cookery, where bland, soft, easily digested food was thought suitable for anyone with a delicate stomach.