Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

When your bananas are beginning to look like Chiquita’s worst nightmare and there’s no time to make banana bread, the fix is easy. Make sautéed Bananas, a simple but widely unappreciated dessert.

If that’s not fancy enough for you, make the pride of New Orleans, Bananas Foster. Its banana liqueur enhances the fruit’s flavor.

In 1951, as the story goes, Owen Brennan, owner of the still-famous Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans, was asked to come up with a new dessert for a magazine feature story on the restaurant. His chef, Paul Blangé, created Bananas Foster, which today is perhaps even more famous than the restaurant.

But who was Foster? Richard Foster was a friend and good customer of Brennan’s, and Brennan named the dish after him. There is no truth to the rumor that Mr. Brennan’s even closer friend, Flawiusz Byczewski, committed suicide after losing out on the naming rights. Nevertheless, we have named our version of this dessert in his honor.

2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

¼ cup honey

¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ground ginger

2 tablespoons banana liqueur, optional

Freshly squeezed lemon juice to taste

4 firm, ripe bananas, peeled and cut lengthwise into quarters

Vanilla or butter pecan ice cream for serving

¼ cup dark rum

1.In a 12-inch skillet, melt the butter over low heat. Add the honey, nutmeg, and ginger and stir until the honey liquefies and the ingredients are well blended. Add the banana liqueur, bring to a boil, and simmer for 2 minutes. (The recipe may be made ahead to this point. Reheat the sauce before continuing.)

2.Taste the sauce. If it is too sweet for your taste, squeeze in a few drops of lemon juice.

3.Add the banana pieces to the simmering sauce. Cook them, basting and turning, for about 3 minutes, or until they begin to soften. Do not overcook.

4.Meanwhile, place scoops of ice cream into each of 4 bowls or soup plates.

5.Pour the rum into a microwave-safe container such as a glass measuring cup and warm it for about 30 seconds on high. Pour the rum over the bananas, stand back, and ignite the vapors with a match.

6.When the flames have subsided, lift the bananas out of the pan and arrange them around the ice cream. Spoon the warm sauce generously over the top of the ice cream and serve immediately.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

THAT’S OIL, FOLKS

Can you comment on the chemical similarity between edible oils (olive, sunflower, etc.) and inedible oils used as lubricants? Is there some chemical quality that makes a substance an “oil”?

Only the fact that they are liquids whose molecules don’t stick together very strongly, so they can slide easily past one another. That’s what makes them slippery. But chemically speaking, these two kinds of oils are quite different. And thereby hangs an embarrassing tale.

A few decades ago I was teaching graduate-level chemistry in Spanish (what chutzpah!) at a university in Venezuela, utilizing the vestiges of my high school Spanish augmented by a few sojourns in Mexico and a six-month residence in Puerto Rico. One day in class I was puzzled by the ripple of smirks that swept the room whenever I referred to the product of Venezuela’s petroleum industry as aceite , which my dictionary had told me was Spanish for oil. A sympathetic student eventually took me aside and explained that aceite refers only to edible oils, most commonly the oil obtained from olives, or aceitunas . The word I should have been using was petróleo . I had inadvertantly been talking about Venezuelans pumping olive oil out of the ground! In the United States we use the same word, oil , for both. (I was partly vindicated years later by an understanding Spaniard, who pointed out that as soon as crude petroleum is refined into motor oil or machine oil, it is indeed referred to as aceite . At least in Spain.)

Petroleum is a mishmash of hundreds of hydrocarbons—compounds of nothing but carbon and hydrogen—which can be separated by distillation or broken down (“cracked”) and refined into hundreds of products from gasoline to Vaseline, not to mention the thousands of synthetic petrochemicals that chemists can create once they get their hands on the raw material.

Hydrocarbons play only minor roles in living things. In fact, it might be said that petroleum consists of once-living plant and animal matter that has had all the life squeezed out of it. Petroleum-derived oils are therefore inert as far as our food metabolism is concerned; they are indigestible. A dose of mineral oil, a highly purified petroleum product, for example, passes straight through the body unchanged, lubricating the entire digestive tract along the way and acting as a laxative.

Although the edible oils that we obtain from plants do contain small amounts of hydrocarbons, they are predominantly triglycerides. Triglyceride molecules are largely similar to hydrocarbon molecules, but in addition to the long chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms, each of the triglyceride molecules also contains six oxygen atoms at one end. And changing the components or structure of a molecule even slightly can make a huge difference in its chemical and physiological properties.

Along with proteins and carbohydrates, triglycerides in the form of either liquid oils or solid fats make up the vital triumvirate of food components. Triglycerides are broken down in our bodies to produce energy, but in excessive amounts they are converted into what are known indecorously as love handles and spare tires.

The 1.4 billion gallons of salad and cooking oils that we consume each year in the United States (that’s 33 million petroleum barrels’ worth) must be processed before they are pure enough and acceptable to our finicky palates. Here are some of the typical cosmetic treatments that vegetable oil may suffer before it lands on your grocery shelf labeled “all-natural” and “100 percent pure”:

First, most of the oil may be squeezed (“expressed” or “expelled” or “expeller-pressed”) out of the seeds by machines called expellers, which can handle as much as 30 tons of sunflower seeds, for example, in a single day. Expellers are screw-driven presses that use friction and pressure to squeeze the oil out of the seeds. The friction can heat the mass of oil and pulp to temperatures of 140 to 210°F (60 to 99°C), although water-cooled expellers are also used to make the “cold-pressed” oils that are preferred by “natural-food” and raw-food enthusiasts.

More often, the oil is dissolved out of (extracted from) the ground-up seeds into hexane, a volatile hydrocarbon liquid that dissolves the oil and is later evaporated off by being heated to 212°F (100°C). Since hexane boils at only 156°F (69°C), there should be virtually none left in the finished oil, although traces of up to 25 parts per million can often be detected. That’s why health-food stores brag about selling “expeller-pressed” and “cold-pressed” oils that have never been in contact with hexane. They’re more expensive, however, because their supply is limited; hexane extraction gets a lot more oil out of the seeds than pressing does.

The crude pressed or extracted oil may then be degummed by the addition of a small amount of water and/or citric acid, which precipitates certain gummy chemicals called phosphatides.

Next, the oil is treated with an alkali (usually sodium hydroxide, or lye), which removes any remaining phosphatides, proteins, and mucilaginous compounds and, most important, neutralizes any free fatty acids, which have unpleasant flavors. The reaction of the alkali with the fatty acids produces soap (yes, soap), which is removed by a later washing with hot water.