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Baked Bananas
Wipe banana and loosen one section of skin, then replace. Place in shallow pan, cover and bake until skin is dark, when banana should be soft. Remove from skin, sprinkle with powdered sugar or serve with lemon sauce. 1 quart cranberries
A three-line recipe that leaves out the oven temperature and the timing, both of which are easy to supply. The stray "1 quart cranberries" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the column and should be ignored.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; 15 to 20 minutes should darken the skins and soften the fruit, though timing will depend on size and ripeness. At higher heat the peel may blacken before the flesh is soft through.
- The loosened sectionLifting one strip of peel and laying it back is the distinctive step. The recipe does not say why; loosening it in advance makes the hot fruit easier to open, and it may let a little steam escape. Slitting the skin lengthwise would presumably serve as well.
- Cover the panCovering traps enough moisture that the flesh steams soft instead of drying at the edges. Foil over a shallow pan works.
- Choose firm fruitYellow bananas with a few brown flecks, not soft ones. Overripe fruit turns to liquid in the skin and will not hold together when peeled out.
- Powdered sugarProbably close to what is now sold as confectioners' sugar, though the term was also used in this period for sugar simply ground finer than granulated. Because the fruit is already sweet, a squeeze of lemon or a grating of nutmeg does more for it than more sugar.
- Lemon sauceThe book refers to it as something already known. Lemon pudding sauces of the period were generally a thickened sugar syrup with butter and lemon juice, served warm; any standard version of that will suit.
- YieldOne banana per person, two if it is the whole dessert. They collapse noticeably out of the skin, so allow generously.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders, part of a broad campaign of domestic and health advice that insurers ran in the early twentieth century on the rationale they advanced that better-fed families made better risks. That commercial context explains the register of this recipe: short, cheap, requiring no equipment beyond a pan and a lid. Bananas had by then gone from a novelty to one of the least expensive fruits in an American city, carried north in quantity by ship from Central America and the Caribbean, and cookbooks of the period worked hard to find uses for them beyond eating out of hand. Baking in the skin is the simplest of these.