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Sausage, with Fried Bananas
Prickle with a fork twelve stringless, fresh sausages, place in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish and keep hot.
Split lengthwise six sound, peeled bananas. Lightly roll them in flour, place and fry in the same pan as the sausages for two minutes on each side, arrange around the sausages and serve.
A two-pan-stage supper that depends entirely on the sausages rendering enough fat for the bananas. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings assume a thin period sausage.
- "Stringless" sausagesProbably sausages sold as separate small links rather than tied off in a linked rope, though the term is not certainly defined. Twelve of them implies breakfast-sized links, on the order of a pound in total; four large bratwurst-sized sausages are not the same thing.
- Five minutes a side is shortThat timing suits a slim link no thicker than a thumb. Modern sausages are usually fatter and need 12–15 minutes total over medium heat, turning, until the centre reaches 160F. Pork sausage should not be served pink at the middle.
- PrickingPricking releases fat and keeps the skins from bursting, which is what you want here, since that rendered fat is the frying medium for the bananas. It does cost you some juiciness, so prick two or three times, not a dozen.
- Butter alone will burnA tablespoon of butter over the time needed to cook sausages through will blacken. Start with a teaspoon of neutral oil and let the sausage fat take over; add the butter to the pan only when the bananas go in, for flavour and browning.
- Choose firm bananas"Sound" here means unbruised and not overripe. A fully speckled banana collapses into mush in the pan. Use fruit that is yellow with green at the tips, or substitute ripe plantains, which hold their shape far better and are closer to what this pairing means in the tropics.
- The flour coatingRoll in flour and shake off the excess — a heavy dredge turns pasty in fat. Season the flour with salt and a little black pepper; the original leaves the bananas entirely unseasoned, which reads flat against salty sausage.
- Fry cut side down firstTwo minutes a side is about right over medium heat. Give the flat cut face the first turn in the pan so it takes an even gold crust, then finish briefly on the rounded side. Move them with a fish slice; tongs tear them.
- YieldTwelve links and six bananas serves four generously as a main course, six as part of a larger breakfast.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathered several thousand recipes under national labels, and this one belongs to the loose category of "tropical" cookery that entered American and European kitchens along with the banana trade. Fried plantain or banana as a starchy foil to salted pork is long-established across the Caribbean, West Africa and Latin America. What makes its appearance in a 1906 general cookbook notable is the assumption that six sound bananas are simply on hand — a fruit that had been an expensive novelty in northern cities a generation earlier and, by the time this book was printed, arrived by steamship cheaply enough to be fried in sausage fat without comment.