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Banana Sandwich (Mash ripe bananas add a dash)
Mash ripe bananas; add a dash of lemon juice; sweeten to taste. Place between thin slices of buttered white bread cut oblong.
A four-line filling that depends entirely on the ripeness of the fruit and on being assembled at the last minute. Two details in the original are worth acting on: the lemon juice and the shape of the cut.
- The lemon is not optionalChiefly it keeps the mashed fruit from browning, though it also sharpens the flavour. The book says only "a dash"; about a teaspoon of juice per banana, stirred in immediately after mashing, is a reasonable reading.
- RipenessBananas heavily flecked with black mash to a smooth paste and need little or no added sugar. Firm yellow fruit stays lumpy and tastes starchy in a sandwich.
- Sweeten to tasteWith ripe fruit, start at a teaspoon of superfine sugar per banana and taste. Confectioners' sugar dissolves without grit if you are serving straight away.
- QuantitiesThe book gives none. Reckon on one large banana filling two or three sandwiches cut from thin bread, depending on how thickly you spread it and how many fingers you cut each into.
- Butter both facesThe recipe specifies buttered bread without saying how much; butter acts as a moisture barrier as much as a seasoning, so spread it thinly to the edges on both slices or the bread will go soft where the filling touches it.
- "Thin slices... cut oblong"The oblong shape and thin bread point to a tea sandwich rather than a lunch one. Slice the loaf thinner than sandwich bread comes today and cut each sandwich lengthwise into fingers. Trimming the crusts is not in the original but is consistent with the style.
- TimingAssemble no more than half an hour ahead and keep the plate covered with a damp cloth. Banana filling is not worth making the night before; it darkens and weeps.
Sandwich books of this kind proliferated in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon created steady demand for small, sweet, crustless things that could be made from whatever was in the house. Bananas belong to that moment for a specific reason: refrigerated steamship transport had, by the early twentieth century, turned them from an occasional luxury into one of the cheapest fruits on an American grocer's counter, and cookbooks of the period put them into everything from salads to fritters. The pairing with lemon juice shows a working cook's knowledge rather than a chef's: enzymatic browning was not household vocabulary, but everyone who had ever mashed a banana knew what happened next. The white bread, thin-sliced and trimmed, is the other period signature -- crusts were removed as a mark of refinement.