Bananas and butter - a surprise ramble

"Yes!! Why? Because bread is tasty, butter is tasty and bananas are tasty!" Neat_Expression 5380/reddit

I've really enjoyed this little ramble around the net, which just started out with bananas and butter and ended up with all sorts of weird and wonderful sandwiches via America's deep south in the Depression, New Orleans, Japan, the Minions, Hitler and Elvis.

Perhaps I should stick to the route I took, which began with bananas and butter, inspired by my fairly regular open banana sandwich for lucnh. Something that looks a bit like this one here. The bread varies according to what we have in the fridge, occasionally it's even toast, if the bread isn't fresh. Sometimes it's one of my guilty soft white rolls, There is always however lashings of butter, topped with sliced firm bananas. Not mushy ones - if the skin has gone even a little bit brown you've lost me. The slices are haphazardly placed as shown here, so they have a tendency to fall off as I eat, so I generally use a tea towel as a kind of bib so that I can wipe my hands and save my clothes from the sticky bananas.

I've been eating this since childhood, even, in that brief desperate period when I was trying to put on weight at university, sprinkled with sugar as an afternoon snack, whilst I read one of the many texts I had to read for my French and English majors, or write an essay on one of them. Not that healthy, but, at the time, I hoped it would put on weight. Alas all the desperate measures I took - all of them disastrously unhealthy - failed to produce much weight gain. So I gave up.

In the last stages of my 'research' - I see I've already digressed from my 'essay plan', I turned to a couple of Facebook references and reddit and there I found a few amusingly odd things about banana sandwiches like:

"I used to peel the banana then stick it in the middle of a buttered slice of white bread, sprinkle it 'generously' with white sugar, roll it up and munch, cutting the banana up was a waste of time!" Glenn Crawford/Facebook

On reddit I encountered these words from cloudysparkles in praise of a toasted banana sandwich which I thought worth showing you:

"Ahhh... the banana butty. Definitely a staple of my childhood. I will make one suggestion: a slightly alternative version. I tried it recently and it was bloody lovely. (Inspired because I was feeling abit depressed and miserable) Make a banana butty: white bread, proper butter, sliced banana and add sugar if required... and here’s where it may get a little odd to some, but i promise you it works. Next grate some milk chocolate over the banana and toast the sandwich: under the grill, in a sandwich toaster, using toaster bags or a panini press- just as long as the bread toasts and goes crispy and the filling is hot. It’s also nice if you add sultanas in the sandwich too. Best dessert toasty ever!"

Also relevant in terms of my effort at gaining weight.

I will return to the sandwiches later - but will just mention Hitler here who appeared in a reference by someone else on reddit saying that the banana butty was Hitler's favourite, although maybe - it wasn't quite clear - with crisps. It followed on from somone mentioning their grandmother ate this, and somebody else said Red Dwarf said it was Hitler's favourite too. Oh dear.

But back to my original essay plan which was not really anything to do with sandwiches - just bananas and butter. Well I wondered what else people did with bananas and butter - if they did at all.

In a way, most of what I found emanated from the simple cooked combination of bananas, butter and sugar, as shown here

with Pan-fried bananas from a website called BellyFull, just because it was the first one I found. There were many, many more, some a little more complicated, some sliced differently, but basically just a process of caramelisation - with firm bananas. Mushy ones are not suitable for this treatment.

Other, slightly more complicated versions of this treatment are: Grilled bananas with bourbon butter - Benjamina Ebuehi/The Guardian; Caramelised banana sundae - Nigel Slater/The Guardian; Salted brown banana caramel ice-cream - Tom Hunt/The Guardian in which the bananas are caramelised before combining with the ice-cream custard, and which he recommended eating:

"topped with 'tart mulberry jam' Next time, though, I think I’ll try it with blackberry jam, chopped pineapple and melted dark chocolate."

The last in this particular section is Bananas Foster - from Daniel Gritzer of Serious Eats who says of it:

"Is bananas Foster a dessert unto itself, in which à la mode is the typical way to serve it? Or are we really just making a banana–flavored caramel sauce for ice cream? My god, maybe it's nothing more than an à la minute banana split, served hot. I think I just lit my brain on fire."

It's actually cooked bananas served in a butter, sugar and dark rum sauce, which is flambéed. And this is where we come to New Orleans, specifically Owen Brennan's Vieux Carré restaurant in 1951, where Ella Brennan and chef Paul Blangé together created this showy dish - as the flambé bit was done tableside. It was named for the chairman of the New Orleans Crime Commission - Richard Foster. Why one is tempted to ask? There must be a story there surely.

But back to bananas and butter. With bread, and here we turn to the overripe bananas and what to do with them. Well of course there is banana bread, and Dan Lepard in The Guardian seemed to make a big thing of the butter, so I include his Melted butter banana cake, even though it's a pretty plain looking one. There were heaps and heaps of other much fancier looking banana breads/cakes out there from just about everyone. Matt Moran made a rather delicious looking Banoffee bread and butter pudding with toffee sauce for delicious. and lots of other people made various versions of French toast.

Two more oddments Mum's banana butter - fuzzygirl/Australia's Best Recipes and Brown banana curd from Tom Hunt on The Guardian website.

At this point I thought I had exhausted my 'research'. There were lots of variations on all of the above, although I don't think I found the last two anywhere else. So I began to look for an opening photograph that would simulate my open simple open banana sandwich.

Which wasn't all that easy because most people made a proper sandwich with two slices of bread. Obviously I did eventually find one approximation, but along the way I discovered a few other differences in the way people made their sandwiches that are worth mentioning.

The first - for which I have no picture, because it's really not worth having one, is a Great Depression recipe from the Deep South of the USA where, instead of butter they use mayonnaise - from a jar of course. Not very appealing but born out of desperation.

Much more common, indeed more common than butter is the peanut butter version - and all those other fashionable butters today. Two examples: Helen's peanut butter and banana sandwiches - Jamie Oliver and Open face peanut butter and chocolate banana sandwich - Woolworths - which is different in that there is no bread, but digestive biscuits instead with a peanut butter and chocolate spread from a jar. Is this a recipe, or just a thought?

The classic here however is Elvis Presley's peanut butter and banana sandwich as given to us by Miss MonMon. in which the banana is mashed and combined with softened peanut butter, made into a sandwich with lightly toasted white bread and then fried in butter. I'm guessing that some people might add chocolate into this version. Maybe using some of that spread in the Woolworth's recipe. Not good for you.

And last of all - well no but we'll come to that - a Frozen banana sandwich from Gelsons whoever they are, for which you slice your bananas lengthways sandwich in white bread spread with softened peanut butter, freeze, then slice. I couldn't quite work out the picture. Am I being stupid, because surely if you've halved the banana the slices wouldn't look like that?

I think this might be more of a kiddy thing than anything. And it definitely has an American feel to it.

And I thought I was done, but as I did a last trawl I came across this Japanese fruit sando - from Genevieve Yam of Serious Eats which is a soft Japanese bread sandwich with fruit carefully placed in a sandwich of mascarpone and cream. No butter in sight, so not strictly relevant here, but I couldn't resist, and there was a throwaway line in which, having told us that you should use fruit with a slight tang, she said:

"The one exception to the sweet and tart rule? Bananas. Because who doesn’t want to have a banana cream pie in sandwich form?"

So of course I looked and found there were many examples - like the generic example, that includes banana shown above right.

And then I found the rather more complicated: Banana and white chocolate Japanese fruit sandwich from Leina Horii/Food and Wine who gives a somewhat poncy explanation:

"Firm banana slices are enveloped in a velvety filling made with buttery white chocolate namelaka — a ganache-like spread whose name translates to “extra creamy” in Japanese (though it was invented at L’École Valrhona in Paris). With its light, mousse-like texture, the filling glides over slices of milk bread, a popular Asian bread prized for its signature texture that balances the softness of the sweet filling with a satisfying chew."

So Paris too. And I almost forgot the Minions who I found on the Professional Moron website, on which the author, in an article about banana sandwiches mentioned that:

"Bananas recently hit the news again when the Minions (from the Despicable Me series) began raving about them."

Nothing to do with sandwiches of course, but he did say:

"Bananas aren’t the most likely candidate for sandwich material. They’re essentially sandwiches, cased as they are within the confines of the inedible banana peel."

Which is a thought I shall leave you with.

Bananas and butter though - yum.

YEARS GONE BY

November 23

2024 - Nothing

2023 - The food curriculum - Literature

2022 - Nothing

2021 - Braided bread

2020 - Missing

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Lucky dip part two - un petit restaurant

2017 - Ice-cream sandwiches - a minor coincidence

2016 - Sharing bits and pieces