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Devilled Bananas
8 bananas 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco ½ teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful chopped pickles Few grains red pepper, or 1 dessertspoonful chopped chillies Slice bananas, mix with salt, chopped pickles and red pepper or chopped chillies and put them into hot Crisco. Cook for four minutes and Sufficient for eight bananas. serve.
A quick sauté from Crisco's own promotional cookbook, where "devilled" means only that something sharp has been added. Four minutes in a hot pan is the whole technique, so have everything cut and measured before the fat goes in.
- Bananas: firm, not ripeFully ripe bananas collapse into paste in a hot pan. Use fruit that is still yellow-green at the tips and cut it into thick coins, about half an inch, so the slices hold their shape.
- The salt is out of proportionThe salt looks high -- 1½ teaspoonfuls of salt for eight bananas reads as a possible misprint (perhaps ½ teaspoonful). Start with ½ teaspoon and taste; the pickles bring salt of their own.
- Crisco and substitutesTwo tablespoons of shortening in a wide skillet. Any neutral fat with a decent smoke point works the same way; butter will brown and burn before four minutes are up.
- "Chopped pickles"Most likely cucumber pickles in vinegar or a chopped mixed pickle; something sour appears to be the point, so drain it well or the pan will steam rather than fry.
- A dessertspoonfulRoughly two teaspoons, sitting between a teaspoon and a tablespoon in old British and American measure.
- Heat and handlingGet the fat properly hot, lay the slices in a single layer, and turn them once. Stirring repeatedly is what turns this into mush.
- Yield and servingEight bananas would stretch to six or eight portions as a side dish; the recipe itself gives no serving suggestion beyond its garbled "Sufficient for eight bananas".
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to explain a genuinely new product: a hydrogenated vegetable shortening sold as a substitute for both butter and lard, promoted partly to Jewish and vegetarian households for whom lard was unusable. That commercial purpose plausibly shapes the book's meatless dishes, where recipes like this one show the fat performing in unfamiliar territory. "Devilled" is an older English kitchen term, recorded in cookery use from the late eighteenth century onward, for anything treated with hot or pungent seasoning — mustard, cayenne, pickle — and it was applied freely to kidneys, crab, eggs and bones. Fried banana as a savoury side was already familiar from Caribbean and Anglo-Indian cooking, so the recipe grafts a British seasoning habit onto a tropical fruit that American grocers, thanks to the banana trade of the 1890s and 1900s, could supply relatively cheaply.