Home › The World's Kitchen › Poached Eggs, Tampa
Poached Eggs, Tampa
Peel and place in a saucepan six small bananas with a half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and two tablespoons cream. Cover the pan and set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, press though sieve into a bowl, mix well, dress on a hot dish and neatly smooth the top. Prepare twelve poached eggs, trim a little all around, then dress on the puree and serve.
A savory banana purée under poached eggs — an odd-looking dish on paper that works because the bananas are seasoned hard with salt, cayenne and butter rather than sugar. Two things decide the outcome: the ripeness of the fruit and getting the eggs onto the purée while both are hot.
- Use ripe but not black bananasFruit that is fully yellow with a few freckles purées smoothly and stays savory. Overripe bananas turn the dish cloyingly sweet and loose, which fights the cayenne and the eggs.
- The measuresHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. A saltspoon is usually reckoned a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne here is assertive — start with an eighth if you are unsure of your pepper. What "cream" meant in this period varied, and it may well have been thinner than modern heavy cream.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe does not use the word "moderate"; a modern moderate oven of about 350F for the stated twenty minutes should soften six small bananas in a covered pan without browning them. The pan must be genuinely covered or the surface dries and skins.
- SievingPressing through a sieve is what gives the purée its texture — a food mill with the fine plate does the same job. A blender or food processor tends to leave it slack, so work it lightly if you use one.
- ConsistencyThe purée should hold a smoothed surface and support an egg without spreading. If it slumps, return it to the pan over low heat for a minute or two to drive off moisture.
- Poaching and trimmingTwelve eggs poached three to four minutes in barely simmering water with a splash of vinegar gives set whites and liquid yolks. "Trim a little all around" means cutting away the ragged skirt of white with a knife or the edge of a spoon so each egg sits as a neat oval.
- Timing the assemblyPoach the eggs while the bananas are in the oven and lift them into warm water to hold. The purée cools fast on the platter, so dress and serve at once.
- YieldSix small bananas and twelve eggs serve six as a lunch or supper dish, two eggs each. It wants nothing more than toast alongside.
The name points to Tampa, a Gulf port whose steamer trade connected it to the Caribbean and Central America. Cheap, plentiful imported bananas were still new enough in the early twentieth century that hotel and restaurant cooks experimented with them outside the dessert course, and a savory banana purée seasoned with cayenne sits squarely in that moment — a tropical ingredient handled with the classical French technique of a purée under eggs. Dishes in The International Cook Book are routinely given place names in this way, marking either a supposed origin or simply the ingredient's association with a city; whether any Tampa kitchen actually served this is not documented. The pairing of poached eggs with a soft, sweet-savory base appears to have been a familiar hotel formula of the period, the same logic that put eggs on spinach, on purée of peas or on chestnut purée.