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Baked Bananas
Peel and cut six bananas in half lengthwise and place in baking dish. Mix on a plate a half ounce fresh butter, an ounce sugar and six drops vanilla essence. Spread this mixture over bananas evenly and set in oven for ten minutes, being careful to baste them once in a while with their own liquor, remove and serve.
A four-ingredient dish that depends almost entirely on the ripeness of the fruit and a hot enough oven. The quantities are small by modern eye and the oven temperature is left out altogether.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Ten minutes implies a fairly brisk oven; a moderately hot oven suits, and a cooler one will need proportionately longer. The bananas are done when the sugar has caught at the edges and the fruit is soft but still holding its shape.
- The weightsHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; an ounce of sugar is about two tablespoons. That is a thin gloss over twelve banana halves rather than a sauce, and it is meant to be.
- Vanilla essenceSix drops is a very small quantity, well under an eighth of a teaspoon of modern extract. Mixing it into the butter and sugar on a plate, as directed, distributes it more evenly than shaking it over the fruit.
- Choosing the bananasUse fruit that is fully yellow and flecked with brown. Underripe bananas stay starchy and faintly astringent through this short a bake, and no amount of sugar covers it.
- BastingThis is the instruction that matters. The bananas release liquid within a few minutes, and spooning it back over them is what keeps the cut surfaces from drying and browning unevenly. The recipe asks only that you baste once in a while over the ten minutes.
- The dishChoose a baking dish that holds the halves snugly in one layer, cut side up. Spread out in a large pan, the small amount of juice evaporates instead of pooling and there is nothing to baste with.
- Yield and servingSix bananas serve four to six as a dessert. Serve straight from the dish while hot, with cream; some books of the period also set baked bananas beside meat dishes.
Baked bananas turn up across late nineteenth and early twentieth century cookery books at precisely the moment bananas stopped being a luxury. Steamship routes from the Caribbean and Central America, together with rail distribution, brought the fruit into ordinary American and European kitchens, and cookbook writers scrambled to suggest what to do with it beyond eating it raw. A book organised around the world's kitchens might well file the dish under the tropics, though the treatment here — butter, sugar, vanilla, a short bake, basting with the pan liquor — is entirely European technique applied to an unfamiliar ingredient. Versions served as a sweet and versions served as a vegetable accompaniment to meat sit side by side in books of the period, which suggests cooks had not yet settled on where the banana belonged in a meal.