No. 3290

Banana Boats

Bateaux de Bananes

Line ten boat-shaped tartlet molds with sweet paste (No. 136), and cook them white. Peel ten small, ripe, short bananas, cut off both ends and plunge the fruit into a boiling twenty-five degree syrup; remove the pan at once from the fire, and let the bananas cool off in this syrup, then drain. Cover the insides of the unmolded boats with apricot marmalade (No. 3675), and lay in each one half a banana, the rounded surface uppermost, brushing it over several times with vanilla apple syrup; garnish both sides with apple jelly (No. 3668).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A barquette of sweet pastry, apricot glaze and a syrup-poached banana, from Charles Ranhofer's Delmonico's repertoire. The cross-references make it look harder than it is; the only real technical point is the syrup.

Twenty-five degree syrupDegrees Baumé, read with a syrup hydrometer, not degrees of temperature. A 25° Bé syrup is roughly 45-48 percent sugar by weight, in the region of 1 lb sugar dissolved in 2 cups water. If you have a refractometer, aim for about 46 Brix; without either, err toward a light syrup, since a heavy one candies the fruit.
Boat-shaped tartlet moldsThese are barquette tins, still sold under that name, about 3-4 inches long. Ten of them make ten servings.
"Cook them white"Blind-bake the shells pale, not golden: bake only until the paste is set and dry but barely coloured. They are glazed and filled afterward, so colour would only fight the apricot.
Sweet paste (No. 136)Ranhofer's pâte sucrée, a short flour-butter-sugar-egg dough. Any standard sweet shortcrust works; chill it well before lining the tins, as barquettes tear easily.
The bananasPlunged into boiling syrup and the pan taken off the fire at once, then left to cool in the syrup. Ripe bananas need no cooking at all; a minute of active simmering turns them to purée. Ten bananas for ten half-bananas is generous, and the halving appears to be lengthwise, since the rounded surface is to sit uppermost.
Apricot marmalade and apple jellyThe marmalade is a thick sieved apricot preserve, warmed and brushed on to waterproof the pastry against the fruit. The apple jelly, piped or spooned along both sides, is a plain clear jelly used as decoration; a firm commercial apple jelly, melted and cooled to setting point, does the same work.
Vanilla apple syrupNot a modern shelf item. Simmer apple trimmings or apple juice with sugar to a light syrup and infuse a split vanilla bean; the repeated brushing is what gives the fruit its shine.
Assemble latePeeled bananas darken and the shells soften. These should be built within an hour or two of serving and kept cool, not refrigerated overnight.

A Little History

Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and the banana barquettes belong to a moment when the fruit was still faintly exotic on an American table. Regular steamship cargoes from the Caribbean had only made bananas widely available in the northeastern cities from the 1870s and 1880s onward, and they appear in period cookbooks as a novelty to be dressed up rather than eaten out of hand. The treatment here is thoroughly classical French: a barquette of sweet paste, a sealing layer of apricot, a glaze of apple jelly, all techniques that would have been applied identically to pears or greengages. Grouping the dish under entremets may carry an echo of an older service order, in which sweet and savoury small dishes alike were said to arrive between the principal courses rather than strictly at the end of the meal, though by Ranhofer's day the entremets were in practice largely the sweet course.