Fried Bananas
Peel and slice lengthwise, fry in butter, sprinkle with sugar, and serve. Thus prepared they make a nice dessert. The bananas must be ripe.
A three-line recipe that works exactly as written, provided the fruit is right and the heat is controlled. The details below fill in what the original assumes.
- Ripeness is the hingeThe instruction "must be ripe" is the whole recipe. Bananas with green shoulders stay starchy and chalky in the pan; use fruit that is fully yellow and heavily freckled, where the starch has turned to sugar and the slices will caramelise rather than just soften.
- Cut and thickness"Slice lengthwise" means cutting along the length rather than into coins. Halving each banana into two long planks is the usual reading, though the recipe does not say how many slices; halves of a medium banana run around half an inch thick or a little more, enough body to turn once without collapsing.
- Pan and fatButter alone browns fast at the temperature needed here. Medium heat, a generous knob, and two to three minutes a side until the cut faces are deep gold. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, buys more margin before the milk solids scorch.
- When the sugar goes onSprinkling sugar while the bananas are still in the pan lets it melt into the butter and glaze the fruit; sprinkling after plating leaves it granular. Either is defensible, but the pan method is what makes this taste like a dessert rather than a side dish.
- Don't crowd or fussTurn each piece once only. Bananas go to mush with repeated handling, and a crowded pan steams them. Cook in batches and serve straight away — they slump within a few minutes of leaving the heat.
- Yield and servingFigure one banana per person as a light dessert, two as a substantial one. Cream, a squeeze of lime or orange, or a grating of nutmeg all sit well with the buttery sugar, though the recipe itself calls for no accompaniment.
Fried bananas appear in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks as a marker of how quickly the fruit went from curiosity to commonplace. Bananas reached the United States in commercial quantity only after steamship routes to the Caribbean and Central America made it possible to land them before they spoiled, and Gulf and Atlantic ports — New Orleans among them — were the entry points. The technique itself is not an American invention: frying ripe plantains or bananas in fat and finishing them with sugar is long established across the Caribbean and Latin America.