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Fried Eggs with Bananas
Peel and cut in halves lengthwise six ripe bananas, place on a plate, cover with cold milk, sprinkle over a half teaspoon salt, let stand for thirty minutes, take up and roll in flour. Thoroughly heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, lay in bananas and gently fry for four minutes on each side, take up with skimmer and arrange one beside another on hot dish. Lightly butter a small frying pan, thoroughly heat on range, then crack in two fresh eggs. Season with light saltspoon salt and half a light saltspoon white pepper, fry for three minutes, then carefully glide the eggs over two half bananas. Prepare five more in a similar way and serve.
A plantain-style side dish treated as a breakfast plate: floured bananas fried in butter, each pair topped with a fried egg. It works, but the quantities in the original are written for one small pan at a time and need scaling up.
- Pick firm-ripe fruitThis is the hinge. Bananas that are soft and freckled will collapse in the pan and refuse to hold a crust. Use fruit that is yellow but still firm to the squeeze, or substitute ripe plantains, which hold their shape far better.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, and "light" means a scant one. So each pair of eggs gets about 1/4 teaspoon salt and a pinch of white pepper.
- Butter is shortA tablespoon and a half will not fry twelve floured banana halves. Work in batches with 2 to 3 tablespoons per batch, wiping the pan and starting with fresh butter if the flour begins to darken.
- The milk soakThirty minutes in salted cold milk seasons the fruit and gives the flour something to cling to. Drain the halves briefly before dredging or the coating turns to paste; a light single coat browns best.
- SkimmerRead this as a slotted spatula or fish slice. The fried halves are fragile and want to be lifted flat, not turned on a fork.
- Egg timingThree minutes in a buttered pan gives a set white and a soft yolk, which is what the dish wants; hold the heat at medium so the bottoms do not brown and toughen before the whites set. If you prefer a firm yolk, cover the pan for the last minute rather than extending the time.
- Scale and yieldSix bananas, twelve halves, twelve eggs: six servings of two halves and two eggs each. Rather than doing six pans in sequence, fry all the bananas first and keep them on a warm platter in a 200F oven, then cook the eggs in one large skillet.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a compendium assembled by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, published at exactly the moment imported fruit was becoming cheap. Bananas were the great grocery novelty of the period, arriving in quantity from Central America and the Caribbean on fast unrefrigerated steamers and rail, with refrigerated steamship transport following in the early 1900s, and cookbooks of the era hurried to find uses for them beyond the fruit bowl. Frying starchy fruit in fat and pairing it with eggs is standard practice across Latin America and the Caribbean — the ancestor here is plainly fried plantain with egg — and Filippini's version, with its milk soak and flour dredge, reads like that idea filtered through a professional French-trained kitchen.