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May 10
Menu: Haricot Soup; Rice Fritters Tomatoes au Gratin; Baked Bananas; Cheese; Bread; Coffee Baked Bananas-Remove skins from 7 bananas and cut in halves lengthwise. Put in shallow granite pan or on an old platter. Mix 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1/3 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons lemon juice. Baste bananas with 1/2 the mixture. Bake 20 minutes in slow oven, basting during baking with remaining mixture.
A simple oven-basted fruit dessert from the Crisco calendar's May menus, where it closed a dinner that ended with coffee. Almost nothing needs changing beyond the oven dial and the pan.
- Slow ovenSet 300F. Twenty minutes at that heat softens the fruit and reduces the syrup without letting the sugar scorch; at 350F check at 12-15 minutes.
- Granite pan"Granite" here means graniteware, the speckled enamel-on-steel bakeware of the period. A modern enamelled or ceramic shallow baking dish is the equivalent — avoid bare aluminium, which reacts with the lemon juice.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, so it appears in place of butter. Melted butter is the better flavour match with bananas and browns more; since the fat here is simply melted for a basting syrup, a neutral oil will do much the same job.
- Choosing bananasUse fruit that is yellow but still firm, with no brown freckling. Fully ripe bananas collapse into a puree in the pan and will not hold their cut halves.
- BastingHalf the syrup goes on before baking and half during, which is the point of the method — the sugar and lemon build a glaze in layers rather than pooling. Baste once or twice at most, so the oven does not lose heat.
- YieldFourteen halves. The recipe gives no stated yield, though two halves each would serve seven. Halve everything for a smaller table.
- ServingGood warm with cream or a plain cake. The syrup thickens as it cools, so spoon the pan juices over the fruit before it sets.
This comes from the 1913 promotional cookbook issued for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening that Procter & Gamble had launched in 1911; the "Calendar of Dinners" section gave a complete menu for every day of the year, each one built around the new fat, and this page is the tail of the May 11 dinner — the baked bananas and the coffee that followed. Bananas were still a relative novelty as a cooked ingredient in American home kitchens, having become cheap and widely available as the Central American steamship fruit trade expanded from the 1880s onward. Baking or broiling them with sugar and citrus was one of the ways cookbooks of the period suggested treating a fruit most readers otherwise ate raw out of the skin.