“It’s not in a book,” my father insists, after I ask where the recipe came from.
Apparently, Bananas & Ham wasn’t invented so much as it was revealed. It came to my grandmother one day and has been faithfully handed down ever since, its origins never questioned and its ritual never altered. It’s less a family recipe than a religious text. Joseph Smith had the Book of Mormon; my grandmother had Bananas & Ham.
I shan’t keep you waiting. The scripture is as follows:
Take a bunch of barely ripe bananas and peel them. Spread each wafer-thin slice of ham generously with English mustard before wrapping it around the bananas. Arrange neatly in an ovenproof dish and cover with a rich cheese sauce (call it Hollandaise if you’re trying to impress the neighbours). Bake at 200°C for 30 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling and golden brown, the ham delicately crisp at the edges and the banana texturally interesting. Delicious with a crisp iceberg lettuce and a garlicky dressing.
Reader, if “texturally interesting” has given you pause, you’re not alone.
We weren’t eating Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We were eating Bananas & Ham, Meat Igloo and Mackerel Salad in Aspic. I assumed every family had a collection of recipes that looked as though they’d been invented during a power cut. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered ours weren’t uniquely ours after all: they belonged to a peculiar wave of 1970s optimism that somehow found its way onto our dinner table and steadfastly refused to leave.
My grandmother thinks it’s perfect. And she is the kind of woman who is usually right. Not loudly right, not the sort to argue her case; she just tends to be correct, and everyone around her eventually notices. Nobody in my family has ever seriously disagreed. By the time it reached our table in a new-build town in the early 2000s, that wasn’t really up for debate.
Which is maybe why, when my father lost his job in the 2008 Crash, we still sat down to Bananas & Ham. There was something to fret about, sure. But there was also a kind of determined optimism passed down along with the recipe: we ate our cheese sauce and translucent ham, and believed tomorrow might taste better than today.
Maybe that’s why I still love it. Not for the taste, but for the faith.
Give it a few years, some chef bloke in a white t-shirt will reinvent Bananas & Ham, plonk it on a small plate, charge £25 for it, and we’ll all clap.
Cecily Hitchcock: Family Recipe, Pleasance Courtyard, until 30 Aug, 8.10pm