Skin some sound bananas; suppress the coarse threads and throw them immediately into boiling water; drain at once, then transfer them to a hot twenty-eight degree syrup; leave to cool in this. Drain once more, range them pyramidically in a compote dish and cover with their own syrup; they are now ready.
Ranhofer's compote is barely cooked at all: the fruit is scalded for seconds and then left to take up sugar as the syrup cools. The whole method depends on two things a modern cook has to translate — the syrup density and the word "immediately."
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its bananas mark a moment of transition. Steam ships and the new Caribbean fruit trade of the 1870s and 1880s had turned the banana from a rarity into something a city market could supply more reliably. The variety Ranhofer would have handled was most likely Gros Michel, the thick-skinned cultivar that dominated export until Panama disease destroyed the trade in it by the mid-twentieth century, and which is usually described as firmer-fleshed than the Cavendish that replaced it — worth knowing, since this compote asks the fruit to hold its shape. The technique itself is standard French pastry practice: scald, steep in syrup of a stated density, let cool in the syrup, a method applied to other fruits in the recipes on either side of this one.