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Banana Toast Sandwich
Between thin slices of lightly buttered graham bread, place three slices of banana; toast quickly to a light brown. Serve hot.
Three lines of instruction, and nearly all of the outcome rests on how you apply the heat. This is a closed toasted sandwich, not toast with banana laid on top.
- The hinge: toast the assembled sandwichThe banana goes between the slices before any heat is applied, so the fruit steams while the bread crisps. Toasting the bread first and building afterwards gives a completely different, and much drier, result.
- How to toast itThe recipe names no equipment; in 1909 this would most likely have meant a wire toaster held over a fire or a gas flame. A dry skillet or a sandwich press over medium-high heat does the same job in roughly two minutes a side; press lightly so the halves seal.
- "Quickly to a light brown"Speed is the point. Banana turns to slack, sugary mush if it sits over low heat, so the bread should colour before the fruit collapses. The instruction implies direct heat rather than an oven; if you do use one, it needs to be hot.
- Graham breadA coarse whole-wheat loaf, often lightly sweetened; period recipes vary a good deal in density. Any decent whole-wheat bread works; a very seedy or heavily grained loaf will fight the banana.
- Butter on the inside onlyAs written, the butter is between bread and fruit. Buttering the outside faces as well, as you would for a grilled cheese, browns faster and more evenly, and is a fair modern adaptation.
- Choosing the bananaRipe but still firm, with no brown flesh. The recipe asks only for three slices; cutting them on a slant and reasonably thick helps them cover the bread and hold together through the toasting.
- YieldOne sandwich, one serving. Multiplied for a tea table, cut each into two triangles or four fingers and send them out at once, while the bread is still crisp.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book appeared in 1909, at a moment when two things had recently become ordinary in American kitchens: the sandwich as a course in its own right, and the banana as a cheap everyday fruit. Fast steamers and the fruit-importing companies of the 1880s and 1890s turned what had been a luxury into something sold from carts, refrigerated shipping following in the early 1900s, and cookbooks of the following decade are full of banana fritters, banana salads and banana sandwiches. The bread is a nod to a different tradition entirely: graham flour is named for Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached coarse unsifted wheat, and by 1909 graham bread had drifted from moral crusade into a wholesome, faintly virtuous everyday loaf. Pairing it with fruit rather than meat places this sandwich among the sweet combinations that the era's tea tables and school lunches demanded.