Banana Pie
Slice raw bananas, add butter, sugar, allspice and vinegar, or boiled cider, or diluted jelly; bake with two crusts. Cold boiled sweet potatoes may be used instead of bananas, and are very nice.
A mock-mince formula rather than a fruit pie: the vinegar and spice are there to give raw fruit the sharp, dark character of a mincemeat filling. The original gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are a starting point, not a reconstruction.
- Proportions to work fromFor a 9-inch double-crust pie, figure 4 to 5 medium bananas sliced about 1/4 inch thick, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons butter in bits, 1 teaspoon allspice, and 2 tablespoons cider vinegar. Boiled cider, if you have it, can stand in for the vinegar, but it is sweeter and much less acid, so it will not match it spoon for spoon.
- The acid is the hingeSugar and allspice alone make the filling flat and cloying; the vinegar or boiled cider is what keeps it from tasting like warm baby food. Start at the low end and taste the mixture before it goes in the shell.
- Boiled cider and "diluted jelly"Boiled cider is sweet cider reduced to a thick syrup, sold by a few New England producers and easy to reduce yourself. "Diluted jelly" is not explained in the original; it most likely means a jelly loosened with a little water to a pourable consistency, and a tart one — currant, crabapple, quince — will do most for the filling.
- Bananas give up waterRipe bananas collapse into liquid in the oven. Use fruit that is yellow with no more than a few brown flecks, and toss the slices with 1 to 2 tablespoons flour to keep the bottom crust from going to paste.
- OvenThe original gives no oven direction beyond "bake with two crusts," so these figures are the editor's: bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is browned and the filling bubbles at the vents. Cut steam slits — this filling produces a lot of vapor.
- The sweet potato versionCold boiled sweet potatoes, sliced or roughly mashed, take the same butter, sugar, spice and acid and hold together far more reliably than banana. Use enough to fill the shell as the bananas would.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Better the day it is baked; the filling weeps on standing.
Bananas reached American markets in quantity only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as steam shipping and rail brought Caribbean fruit inland, and cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s show cooks trying to fit the novelty into forms they already knew — hence a banana treated exactly like a pan of green apples or a jar of mincemeat, with butter, spice and vinegar under two crusts. The vinegar-and-allspice pairing is the signature of the mock mince tradition, a family of pies that stood in for the meat-and-suet original when a household lacked the makings; recipes of the period built the same filling from crackers, green tomatoes or dried apples. That the entry ends by offering cold boiled sweet potatoes as a substitute says a good deal about how such formulas were used: the flavoring was the recipe, and whatever bulk the kitchen had on hand went into it.