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Scrambled Eggs with Bananas
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, beat up with a fork for one minute. Peel and cut two sound bananas in quarter-inch-square pieces. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add the bananas and briskly fry for three minutes, lightly tossing them meanwhile. Drop in the eggs, then cook for six minutes, briskly mixing once in a while, pour in a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward pan of scrambled eggs with fried banana, from the era when soft-scrambled eggs were not yet the ideal. The only real decision is how long you let them go.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons "" about 60 ml. That is generous for eight eggs; 2 to 3 tablespoons gives a firmer curd if you prefer it.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is about half a teaspoon. That is a noticeable amount of pepper against the sweetness of the banana, which is likely the point.
- Six minutes is a long timeSix minutes of brisk cooking will give dry, granular eggs by modern taste. Over medium-low heat, pull them at 2 to 3 minutes while they are still glossy and slightly loose; they finish setting on the hot dish.
- The bananas"Sound" means firm and unbruised "" choose fruit that is just yellow, not spotted. Very ripe bananas collapse into the eggs instead of holding their quarter-inch dice.
- ButterOne tablespoon is thin cover for eight eggs plus fruit in a large pan. Two is safer, and use a nonstick or well-seasoned pan, since banana sugars catch quickly.
- Order of operationsFry the banana first and get some color on it, but do not let the pan get hot enough to scorch the sugar before the eggs go in. Lower the heat as you add the egg mixture.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously as a breakfast dish, or three as a main.
Scrambled eggs with banana belongs to a brief moment in American and European cooking when the banana was newly cheap, newly everywhere, and treated as a vegetable as readily as a dessert. Steam shipping and, later, refrigerated holds helped turn it from a relative luxury in the 1870s into an ordinary grocery item by the early twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period responded by fitting it into savory contexts "" fried in butter as a garnish for meat, curried, or folded into eggs as here. The pairing is less strange than it sounds, since fried banana or plantain with eggs remains standard breakfast fare across the Caribbean, West Africa and parts of Latin America.